Devil's Tor by David Lindsay

[Swan]

Considering how highly rated David Lindsay's philosophical novel A Voyage to Arcturus is, apart from The Haunted Woman I haven't seen any of his other books available at a sensible price. However Devil's Tor has now turned up on one of the online subscription sites I use.




Ingrid Fleming has always believed a goddess lies buried beneath the forbidding, Devil-headed rock-pile atop Devil's Tor. But when the pile is shattered in a sudden storm, it's her cousin, Hugh Drapier, who enters the newly-revealed tomb.



Drapier has recently arrived from Tibet, where an encounter with the adventurer Henry Saltfleet and the archeologist Stephen Arsinal has left him in possession of a stolen sacred stone, the half of a broken whole, which has the power to induce visions of its arrival on Earth in the early days of primitive humanity.



Arsinal believes the stone to be sacred to the Great Mother, and key to a prophecy that will unite a chosen man and woman, and bring about the birth of a new saviour. He and Saltfleet return to England on Drapier's trail, and arrive in Dartmoor just as the machinery of a thousands-year-long supernatural fate begins its final turn...



A troubled, troubling, ambitious and difficult work that David Lindsay himself called his "monster," Devil's Tor answers the imaginative pyrotechnics of Lindsay's first novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, with a sustained maturity of insight into the intensely-felt and deeply-examined inner lives of its handful of characters, and the fate that has brought them together at the dawn of a new human era.



At times irrecoverably tangled in the attitudes of its day, Devil's Tor nevertheless builds to a transcendent final vision of the ultimate purpose of human life and suffering

[helrunar]

That all sounds quite promising, until one gets to this reader's comment:  ...  the action of David Lindsay’s fifth published novel is almost exclusively limited to quiet drawing rooms, in intense examinations of characters’ motives and inner musings on fate. Dense and often difficult (Gary K Wolfe has said it sometimes reads “like a Henry James translation of Kant”)...

Yikes!

H.

[Middoth]

it is true, his books on abebooks cost a tidy sum.
but they are find in ebook format
Although Douglas Anderson assures that there is a version of the 'Witch" 3 times larger in volume than the one that is printed. But it only exists in manuscript. The one that is printed I read

[Knygathin]

I completed struggling my way through this difficult book. I doubt many have read it, and that few who have started reading have finished it.

As much a work of philosophy as fiction. A tremendous book. Painful, but ultimately a revealing spiritual journey. And it makes a convincing argument of dismissing Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. I think reading it has made me a better and freer being.

That large part of the book dedicated to extended discussions between the characters as to who is and who is not fitted and spiritually mature enough to come along for the closer study of a certain cosmic/spiritual artifact on a hilltop, seems to be intentionally written in a convoluted prose (verbs and their connected nouns placed far apart, and in backward order) to stall the reader, in order to make the effort and pondering of the spiritual journey even greater. On top of this the Resonance print-on-demand edition appears riddled with typos. So yes, this was the slowest book I have ever read. Hodgson's The Night Land is a walk in the park comparatively. The boring middle part of Dracula the same.

But the relatively sparse episodes in which Lindsay describes the landscape scenery and weird phenomena, are clearly and well written. His sensibility of the supernatural sparkles, and sometimes reminds me of Algernon Blackwood. They were of the same generation, both transcendentalists.

[Knygathin]

Whew! I am sure glad it's over. It can sink in, without any further effort on my part. M O O N, that spells relief!

I won't be reading any further heavy novels for a long while. Anyway, the short story format was always my favorite. I am now ready for some more lighthearted entertainment! I have not read "A Cask of Amontillado" yet. And I want to revisit Charles Birkin. This will also give me an excellent excuse to open a bottle of Amontillado, a beverage I never tried before. It should go well with gratinated mussels.

[Knygathin]

There is an imperative stone in the novel, split in half. But I think Lindsay would have boosted it, if he had split the stone in three instead. Because all good things are three. I found a black lava stone on the beach, which was a third of an original round stone. It fit perfectly in my hand, its edge snugging into the crease between the thumb and index finger. I held it in my hand while reading, to make it easier and my mind more focused. I also found on the beach a whole stone of the same format that was round as an egg, peculiarly heavy, which I held when I was done with the book, ... and before, when I thought I had figured it all out.