Post by gavincallaghan on Feb 19, 2007 16:38:51 GMT -6
Have just finished reading a fascinating book by Peter Straub, entitled Shadowland (1980), which apparently won a well-deserved World Fantasy Award for 1980, and which has several interesting definitions of magic in it.
At first I disliked the book intensely, and thought a lot of extraneous material could have been trimmed. I also disliked it stylistically, and did not like the structure of many of the sentences; I thought that Straub, as a best-selling author, was perhaps getting away with a certain amount of sloppiness. It was also difficult, given the odd chronological structure and framing of the book, to determine what the viewpoint was, and who the protagonist of the story was meant to be.
As the story progressed, however, focusing more and more on its magical protagonists and less on its background, I grew to like it more and more. It would actually, I think, make a first-class film, a sort of darker Harry Potter film.
The book is set in an elite boy’s school in the 1950’s in Arizona. The sole interests of the school’s narrow-minded staff and administration are varsity sports, the squashing of imagination, and the ensuring of complete and docile obedience, often through cruel, violent, and religious means. If the book is ever adapted into a film, I would like to see it updated to the present day, with the school’s staff symbolizing the Bush II administration. There is a soliloquy uttered by the school’s evil and authoritarian principal, Laker Broome, near the beginning of the book, which is absolutely incredible, and has the student who hears it almost puking with fear.
The story deals with two students in the freshman class, a fifteen year old named Tom Flanagan, who has magical powers of which he is completely unaware, and a newcomer to the school, a tiny, fabulously wealthy Greek boy named Del Nightingale, whose uncle is a famous and mysterious magician. Their nemesis, as well as the nemesis of the entire freshman student body, is a psychopathic senior student named Steve “Skeleton” Ridpath, the deviant son of the school’s varsity sports coach. Ridpath, who lashes and beats younger students unmercifully, is called “Skeleton” due to his eerie, thin, and skull-like appearance, and spends most of his spare time at home creating a weird collage on the ceiling of his room, showing army vehicles and murder scenes from newspapers, the bodies of nude women whose heads have been replaced by animals, piles of dead bodies. There is an interesting flashback later in the story, where Tom remembers how, in Middle School, Skeleton once held him down and hit him repeatedly in the face, muttering, “You fucking Irish nigger” ---an incident which is similar to something which once happened to me in High School.
Through his descent into deviancy and black magic, Skeleton begins to make contact with some strange dark being at the heart of creation:
“Skeleton knew that he was a piece of the universe, and that the hatred which was the strongest and best part of him ran through the universe like a bar of steel. Skeleton had seen desert vultures, and violent bands of color in the desert sky; and he had seen the sand far out of town turn purple and red when night came on. Even in his baffled and empty childhood, he had known that such things were in his key, that they struck the same note as the deep well of black feelings within himself. Other people were blinkered, self-deluded rabbits: they looked at the desert and saw what they called ‘beauty’, walling themselves off from it. Other people were afraid of the truth at the world’s heart. Every man was a killer--- that was what Skeleton knew. Every leaf, every grain of sand, had a killer in it. If you touched a tree, you could feel a wave of blackness pumping through it, drawn up from the ground and breathed out through the bark.
And lately, as he worked more and more on his ‘things’, as he called the varnished images of pain and fear on his walls, he had come closer and closer to that truth. Skeleton had begun to have knew ideas about his ‘things’, ideas he could scarcely bear to peep at. They were a unity, they were the unity that was Skeleton Ridpath, but there was something more.
And lately….
lately…
he had, peeping at his new ideas, seen glimpses of their power. A man was showing him how right he was, and how little he still knew. It was as if the man had stepped off his walls, walked out of the ‘things’ and lifted his broad-brimmed hat from his head to show the face of a beast. The man, who was everywhere and nowhere, in his dreams and hovering just out of sight as he prowled from one room to another, was animal, tree, desert, bird… he wore a long belted coat, his hat shaded his face--- he was what was real. He spoke to Skeleton when Skeleton thought about him: and what he said was: I have come to save your life. He wanted something of poor Skeleton, his will drove out at poor Skeleton, and poor Skeleton would have cut off all the fingers of one hand for him. He had power to make a king’s look feeble. He was like the music at the heart of music, what the musicians would play if they were twelve feet tall and made of thunder and rain.
He is me, Skeleton thought. Me. He grinned up in the darkness at a picture of a giant bird.” (60-61)
Later, just before the end of the school year, Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale put on a magic show called “Flanagini and Night, Illusionists”. There, they give a definition of magic during the show. It goes:
“Flanagini’s head stared out from beneath the turban. ‘What is the first law of magic?’ Night asked, and the floating head answered, ‘As above, so below.’ ‘And what is the second law of magic?’ Night asked. ‘The physical world is a bauble.’ ‘And what is the third law of magic?’ ‘Reality is extremity.’” (132)
At the climax to the show, just as Del is about to say the magic word “Fly” and “float up and amaze everybody”, Del pauses, staring at something at the back of the auditorium, near the roof. There, he and Tom see “‘Skeleton Ridpath. He was terrible. He was grinning. He looked like a big bat, or a huge spider---something awful.” In the vision, Tom also sees a fire, and suddenly one of the school’s outbuildings catches on fire, the flames spreading to trap everyone in the auditorium.
Even more fascinating, later on in the story, Tom sees what Skeleton Ridpath saw from his perspective as the giant spider on the roof of the auditorium. They see the evil school principal,
“...his face a lunatic’s, mouthing gibberish. A hundred boys twisted and howled in their seats, many of them bleeding from the eyes and nose. Noise like a foul smoke rose from them, and Mr. Broome screamed, ‘I want Steven Ridpath! Skeleton Ridpath! The only graduate of the class of ‘59. Come up here and get your diploma!’ He held out a burning document, and Tom felt himself sailing up, his limbs spidery, all of his skin so tight it felt it might split open….” (409)
Later, after the fire at the end of the school year, Tom and Del spend the summer at Del’s uncle’s house, the home of Coleman Collins the magician, learning about magic ---- becoming more and more unsure the whole time whether what they are seeing is reality or illusion. Collins, Del explains, was once a great magician in Europe, but decided to give up on performing in order solely to work on his magic alone, giving performances to no one but himself in his own private theater…..
In one scene, Collins takes Tom on a ride through the snow, to a plain where he sees his burning school in miniature. In another scene, Tom is transported onto a train car just as it crashes: the same wrecked train car which he and Del passed on their trip to the magician’s house in Vermont, making Tom wonder whether the magician destroyed the train car on purpose, just so that he could be transported onto it.
Collins, it turns out, has also crossed paths with many of the great magical minds of Europe, including Aleister Crowley, Gurdgieff, and Oupensky. Collins explains:
“'Ernest Hemingway bought me a drink in a Montparnasse bar but would not come to my table because he thought I was a charlatan. I heard that he had referred to me as "that dime-a-dance Rasputin", a description I did not mind a bit. The real tinpot Rasputin was an Englishman who fancied himself a demon. I met Aleister Crowley in England, and knew at once that he was a sick, deluded fraud ---a blubbery ranter whose greatest talent was for mumbo-jumbo.
“‘Crowley and I met in the garden of a house in Kensington belonging to a rich and foolish fancier of the occult who supported both of us and wanted to know what would happen if we met. I was already in the garden when Crowley oozed through the scullery door. He was slug like, thoroughly repulsive; wore a black caftan; dirty bare feet; shaven head. His face was crazy and ambitious--- there was a kind of crude magnetism to him. Crowley looked me in the eye, trying to frighten me. ‘Hello, Aleister,’ I said. ‘Begone, fiend!’ he shouted, and pointed a fat digit at my face. I turned his hand into a bird’s claw, and he nearly fainted on the spot. ‘Begone, yourself,’ I said, and he shoved the claw under the caftan and exited in great haste. Later I understand he displayed the claw to a female admirer as proof of his satanic abilities, and worked over spells for months before he was able to change it back.’” (360)
Soon, it turns out that Collins is actually an evil Being who has been twisting the events of the lives of Tom, Del, and everyone else at their school from the very beginning, and that he intends to kill them all. Collins, they learn, is actually the rogue member of an ancient magical order, who has twisted the teachings of the book of the order ----a book which, Straub reveals, is actually the original version of the Gospel of Thomas saying-book discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Tom further learns that Collins magically defeated his former master, Speckle John, during their farewell magic-performance in Paris ---that Collins speared Speckle John onstage, and that he still holds him speared. Tom learns, too, that the faces of the crowd painted on the walls of Collins’ home theatre in Vermont are actually the frozen faces of the people in the theatre at the time of that last Paris performance, Collins' farewell performance never having actually ended.......
The devil appears several times throughout the ending of the book to tempt Tom, but Tom rejects him, and the devil, called “M” in the novel, watches smiling from the audience as Tom is crucified by Collins on the theater during the continuation of his farewell performance. How Tom escapes from the cross, by tearing his hands free from the nails, is a high point of the book, and makes truly remarkable reading……
GDC
At first I disliked the book intensely, and thought a lot of extraneous material could have been trimmed. I also disliked it stylistically, and did not like the structure of many of the sentences; I thought that Straub, as a best-selling author, was perhaps getting away with a certain amount of sloppiness. It was also difficult, given the odd chronological structure and framing of the book, to determine what the viewpoint was, and who the protagonist of the story was meant to be.
As the story progressed, however, focusing more and more on its magical protagonists and less on its background, I grew to like it more and more. It would actually, I think, make a first-class film, a sort of darker Harry Potter film.
The book is set in an elite boy’s school in the 1950’s in Arizona. The sole interests of the school’s narrow-minded staff and administration are varsity sports, the squashing of imagination, and the ensuring of complete and docile obedience, often through cruel, violent, and religious means. If the book is ever adapted into a film, I would like to see it updated to the present day, with the school’s staff symbolizing the Bush II administration. There is a soliloquy uttered by the school’s evil and authoritarian principal, Laker Broome, near the beginning of the book, which is absolutely incredible, and has the student who hears it almost puking with fear.
The story deals with two students in the freshman class, a fifteen year old named Tom Flanagan, who has magical powers of which he is completely unaware, and a newcomer to the school, a tiny, fabulously wealthy Greek boy named Del Nightingale, whose uncle is a famous and mysterious magician. Their nemesis, as well as the nemesis of the entire freshman student body, is a psychopathic senior student named Steve “Skeleton” Ridpath, the deviant son of the school’s varsity sports coach. Ridpath, who lashes and beats younger students unmercifully, is called “Skeleton” due to his eerie, thin, and skull-like appearance, and spends most of his spare time at home creating a weird collage on the ceiling of his room, showing army vehicles and murder scenes from newspapers, the bodies of nude women whose heads have been replaced by animals, piles of dead bodies. There is an interesting flashback later in the story, where Tom remembers how, in Middle School, Skeleton once held him down and hit him repeatedly in the face, muttering, “You fucking Irish nigger” ---an incident which is similar to something which once happened to me in High School.
Through his descent into deviancy and black magic, Skeleton begins to make contact with some strange dark being at the heart of creation:
“Skeleton knew that he was a piece of the universe, and that the hatred which was the strongest and best part of him ran through the universe like a bar of steel. Skeleton had seen desert vultures, and violent bands of color in the desert sky; and he had seen the sand far out of town turn purple and red when night came on. Even in his baffled and empty childhood, he had known that such things were in his key, that they struck the same note as the deep well of black feelings within himself. Other people were blinkered, self-deluded rabbits: they looked at the desert and saw what they called ‘beauty’, walling themselves off from it. Other people were afraid of the truth at the world’s heart. Every man was a killer--- that was what Skeleton knew. Every leaf, every grain of sand, had a killer in it. If you touched a tree, you could feel a wave of blackness pumping through it, drawn up from the ground and breathed out through the bark.
And lately, as he worked more and more on his ‘things’, as he called the varnished images of pain and fear on his walls, he had come closer and closer to that truth. Skeleton had begun to have knew ideas about his ‘things’, ideas he could scarcely bear to peep at. They were a unity, they were the unity that was Skeleton Ridpath, but there was something more.
And lately….
lately…
he had, peeping at his new ideas, seen glimpses of their power. A man was showing him how right he was, and how little he still knew. It was as if the man had stepped off his walls, walked out of the ‘things’ and lifted his broad-brimmed hat from his head to show the face of a beast. The man, who was everywhere and nowhere, in his dreams and hovering just out of sight as he prowled from one room to another, was animal, tree, desert, bird… he wore a long belted coat, his hat shaded his face--- he was what was real. He spoke to Skeleton when Skeleton thought about him: and what he said was: I have come to save your life. He wanted something of poor Skeleton, his will drove out at poor Skeleton, and poor Skeleton would have cut off all the fingers of one hand for him. He had power to make a king’s look feeble. He was like the music at the heart of music, what the musicians would play if they were twelve feet tall and made of thunder and rain.
He is me, Skeleton thought. Me. He grinned up in the darkness at a picture of a giant bird.” (60-61)
Later, just before the end of the school year, Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale put on a magic show called “Flanagini and Night, Illusionists”. There, they give a definition of magic during the show. It goes:
“Flanagini’s head stared out from beneath the turban. ‘What is the first law of magic?’ Night asked, and the floating head answered, ‘As above, so below.’ ‘And what is the second law of magic?’ Night asked. ‘The physical world is a bauble.’ ‘And what is the third law of magic?’ ‘Reality is extremity.’” (132)
At the climax to the show, just as Del is about to say the magic word “Fly” and “float up and amaze everybody”, Del pauses, staring at something at the back of the auditorium, near the roof. There, he and Tom see “‘Skeleton Ridpath. He was terrible. He was grinning. He looked like a big bat, or a huge spider---something awful.” In the vision, Tom also sees a fire, and suddenly one of the school’s outbuildings catches on fire, the flames spreading to trap everyone in the auditorium.
Even more fascinating, later on in the story, Tom sees what Skeleton Ridpath saw from his perspective as the giant spider on the roof of the auditorium. They see the evil school principal,
“...his face a lunatic’s, mouthing gibberish. A hundred boys twisted and howled in their seats, many of them bleeding from the eyes and nose. Noise like a foul smoke rose from them, and Mr. Broome screamed, ‘I want Steven Ridpath! Skeleton Ridpath! The only graduate of the class of ‘59. Come up here and get your diploma!’ He held out a burning document, and Tom felt himself sailing up, his limbs spidery, all of his skin so tight it felt it might split open….” (409)
Later, after the fire at the end of the school year, Tom and Del spend the summer at Del’s uncle’s house, the home of Coleman Collins the magician, learning about magic ---- becoming more and more unsure the whole time whether what they are seeing is reality or illusion. Collins, Del explains, was once a great magician in Europe, but decided to give up on performing in order solely to work on his magic alone, giving performances to no one but himself in his own private theater…..
In one scene, Collins takes Tom on a ride through the snow, to a plain where he sees his burning school in miniature. In another scene, Tom is transported onto a train car just as it crashes: the same wrecked train car which he and Del passed on their trip to the magician’s house in Vermont, making Tom wonder whether the magician destroyed the train car on purpose, just so that he could be transported onto it.
Collins, it turns out, has also crossed paths with many of the great magical minds of Europe, including Aleister Crowley, Gurdgieff, and Oupensky. Collins explains:
“'Ernest Hemingway bought me a drink in a Montparnasse bar but would not come to my table because he thought I was a charlatan. I heard that he had referred to me as "that dime-a-dance Rasputin", a description I did not mind a bit. The real tinpot Rasputin was an Englishman who fancied himself a demon. I met Aleister Crowley in England, and knew at once that he was a sick, deluded fraud ---a blubbery ranter whose greatest talent was for mumbo-jumbo.
“‘Crowley and I met in the garden of a house in Kensington belonging to a rich and foolish fancier of the occult who supported both of us and wanted to know what would happen if we met. I was already in the garden when Crowley oozed through the scullery door. He was slug like, thoroughly repulsive; wore a black caftan; dirty bare feet; shaven head. His face was crazy and ambitious--- there was a kind of crude magnetism to him. Crowley looked me in the eye, trying to frighten me. ‘Hello, Aleister,’ I said. ‘Begone, fiend!’ he shouted, and pointed a fat digit at my face. I turned his hand into a bird’s claw, and he nearly fainted on the spot. ‘Begone, yourself,’ I said, and he shoved the claw under the caftan and exited in great haste. Later I understand he displayed the claw to a female admirer as proof of his satanic abilities, and worked over spells for months before he was able to change it back.’” (360)
Soon, it turns out that Collins is actually an evil Being who has been twisting the events of the lives of Tom, Del, and everyone else at their school from the very beginning, and that he intends to kill them all. Collins, they learn, is actually the rogue member of an ancient magical order, who has twisted the teachings of the book of the order ----a book which, Straub reveals, is actually the original version of the Gospel of Thomas saying-book discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Tom further learns that Collins magically defeated his former master, Speckle John, during their farewell magic-performance in Paris ---that Collins speared Speckle John onstage, and that he still holds him speared. Tom learns, too, that the faces of the crowd painted on the walls of Collins’ home theatre in Vermont are actually the frozen faces of the people in the theatre at the time of that last Paris performance, Collins' farewell performance never having actually ended.......
The devil appears several times throughout the ending of the book to tempt Tom, but Tom rejects him, and the devil, called “M” in the novel, watches smiling from the audience as Tom is crucified by Collins on the theater during the continuation of his farewell performance. How Tom escapes from the cross, by tearing his hands free from the nails, is a high point of the book, and makes truly remarkable reading……
GDC