Now Reading: THE GOLDEN FLEECE by Robert Graves

The Golden Fleece is another fruit of Robert Graves’ efforts as revisionist historian and folklorist which culminated in his nonfiction work The White Goddess. The novel is written as though by a classical-age scholar who still had access to the original details of Jason’s quest for the Fleece. After an amusing first chapter, the story bogs down for a while, because Graves is so thorough in providing background. His syntax is ornate and old-fashioned, giving the flavor of the old Greek style, and a far cry from the lean descriptive technique of most contemporary novels. Still, readers with an interest in Greek mythology and the ancient worship rituals described in Fraser’s The Golden Bough will find enough to hold their interest until the story begins in earnest.
  Once the Argo is ready to set sail on its famous quest, The Golden Fleece offers pleasures much like those found in such eighteenth century novelists as Smollett and Fielding. Here too a stately, long-sentenced style, apparently somber and sincere, is used to tell a story full of sly humor and bawdy detail, in this case with a bit more casual slaughter and mass copulation.
  The chapters including the Argonauts’ sometime companion Hercules are pure slapstick, but the comedy continues even after that blustering hero with his penchant for incidental homicide has been left behind. Another recurrent comic figure is the fanatical beekeeper Butes, who critically appraises the honey they taste at every stop and becomes the accidental cause of tragedy. The Golden Fleece is perhaps as much a specialized taste as one of the rarer honey blends Butes admires, but it’s hard to imagine any other writer serving up such rich blend of avid scholarship and an engaging comic voice. ~ David Maclaine

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 2009: Andrew Taylor

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects …

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
I’d like to say CRIME AND PUNISHMENT or THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY but (to be brutally honest) the one I’d really, really, really like to have written is my next one.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I’m delighted to say that guilt and reading don’t go together for writers. Or not for this one. My tastes are catholic. I work on the assumption that everything I read must in some way feed into the great creative mulch from which my own novels spring like constipated bog monsters in very slow motion. Most satisfying writing moment?
When a book is going well. It’s like being God on a good day (see below).
The best Irish crime novel is …?
This is a difficult one for an author who labours under the disadvantage of being only half Irish ... At first I thought almost anything by the humane, satirical and eminently clubbable Ruth Dudley Edwards (if pressed I’d say MATRICIDE AT ST MARTHA’S is my favourite). I enjoy Declan Hughes too – he’s going places. But the one I keep coming back to, time and again, is Flann O’Brien’s THE THIRD POLICEMAN, which does what all great novels ought to make you do: it makes you think, and much else. It’s also got my favourite all-time, all genre fictional ending. Longman’s (who had published AT SWIM TWO BIRDS) turned the book down in 1940. “We realize,” they wrote with infinite snootiness, “the author’s ability but think that he should become less fantastic and in this new novel he is more so.” It wasn’t published until 1967, after O’Brien’s death, and then only because of the persistence of an Irish publisher, Timothy O’Keefe.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
See above.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Writing / writing. Trite but true.
The pitch for your next novel is …?
Set in the 1930s, BLEEDING HEART SQUARE is partly based on a celebrated real-life Victorian murder case with links to my grandmother’s family. The novel deals with a young woman who flees from her abusive aristocratic husband to an uncertain refuge with her unknown father. He drinks his life away in a place where, according to legend, the devil once danced and tore out the heart of a beautiful woman. Now someone is sending raw (and sometimes rotting) hearts in the post and the British Union of Fascists are out on the streets. A seedy plain-clothes policeman haunts the square, detecting his nightmares. An unemployed journalist wants to win back the woman he loves but she seems to care more for a public-school communist with large private income. And no one has seen the woman who owns the house in Bleeding Heart Square for more than four years.
Who are you reading right now?
Tobias Smollett’s THE EXPEDITION OF HUMPHREY CLINKER and Harlan Coben’s new one, HOLD TIGHT. An interesting combination. There’s pleasure in reading more than one thing at once. They interact – in my case, most recently, with Stieg Larsson’s THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, a book weighed down with too much hype, but much of it is justified.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
First I say to him, You bastard. But of course it would have to be writing, if I couldn’t find a way to change God’s mind. As God Himself knows, it’s much more fun to create.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Not there yet.

Andrew Taylor’s BLEEDING HEART SQUARE is published on May 29