How can there be a book no man can read?

[sovay]

I was recently discussing Greer Gilman's Moonwise (1991) and Cloud & Ashes (2009), which set me listening to Anne Lister's "Beech and Willow," and now I am trying to decide whether to re-read Peter Blair's The Coming of Pout (1966) where I first encountered the riddle-song refrain of perry merry dixi, dominee. The impediment is that the book drives me up the wall.

It is not a bad book in most of the usual senses; it just collapses so completely in the last chapter that it's difficult to recommend to anyone who isn't willing to be disappointed. Until then, I love quite a few things about it, including its trickster, its fenlands, its brother and sister caught up in the midsummer mystery, and its illustrations by Trina Schart Hyman. Redheaded, down-to-earth Sandy is associated with the sun; black-haired, second-sighted Sally with the moon; and Pout himself is likened to the wind, swinging constantly around its unpredictable compass. He's a great trickster. We never get much of an official description of him beyond his gestures and expressions, but Hyman draws him as a monastic little figure whose face is never really seen; his moods are mercurial, his conceit enormous, and his greatest triumph the freezing night of February 12, 1322 when he engineered the fall of the central tower of Ely Cathedral. He's reckoned the years since then in the calendar P.P.T.: "Post Pouti Triumphum, of course!" It was his revenge for being bound to the cathedral eight hundred years ago, from which he explains his sole chance of freedom lies in finding the elusive Green Hellebore—Helleborus viridis, as he's so fond of deploying schoolmasterly Latin into otherwise unsuspecting conversations—though sometimes he claims to be searching for the spell-breaking plant for the sake of Cerberus, who wandered centuries ago out of Greek myth, through the legend of Edmund the Martyr, and into an equally mystifying fate. He swears in explosive alliterations like "Shirt-studs and shibboleths!" or "Spitfires and spatchcocks!" and his temper can be frightening, but he deflates so forlornly at a warning word from Sally that it's impossible for either sibling to hold a grudge against him, especially when he can also be whimsical and kind. He plunders saints' reliquaries for soup bones and is overjoyed to be introduced to chocolate. Probably the book's worst failing is that it tries to explain him when he doesn't need to be anything but himself. Its second-worst failing is that it tries to explain its own plot. Right up through the finale, the narrative runs on the kind of dream logic that is always on the verge of turning into nightmare, as if some greater pattern is moving underneath the surface of medieval songs and herbal lore and too-close-for-chance encounters with a relentlessly garrulous professor whose eccentricity seems comic and sinister by turns; it's funny and shivery and occasionally touches on the real, numinous strangeness of history and time and then it all falls in on itself like the fourteenth-century tower of Ely with a near-monologue of a wrap-up that answers a lot of questions the reader wasn't asking and leaves all the shadowy, suggestive substance of the book unaddressed and I can't even see it as a deliberate effect, it's so undercutting. It feels as though the author was writing by the seat of his unconscious and at the last minute made the mistake of trying to think about it. Any trickster could have told him you can stand on air forever so long as you don't look down.

Decades after reading the book for the first time, I discovered it was the first and only work of fiction by a noted medievalist. I am guessing that it evolved out of the history of the tower's fall and also perhaps a couple of local gargoyles mentioned in the text; it has obvious antecedents in Kipling and Nesbit and obvious age-mates in Cooper and Garner and I just wish it was as strong as any of them. The author was later married to Pauline Clarke. Maybe they should have collaborated. I remember her knowing how to end a story.

In any case, my day majority-sucked, but we had waffles in the evening and complaining analytically about this book seems to have cheered me up. My plan for the rest of the evening is, sadly, capitalism.

Comments

[ashlyme]

I'd like to try this anyway. But close the book before I read that last chapter. Pout's oaths remind me of "Toasted cheese!" from Lud.

*Any trickster could have told him you can stand on air forever so long as you don't look down.*

Please use this in a story if you can. I love it.

Have a *hug* for capitalism. Then several more.

[pengwern]

:< sorry for the capitalism in the evening and the collapse (although it seems a fine idea to review things with "only for those open to disappointment" XDDDD). I'd never realized that refrain was its own thing wandering from song to song, though!

[gwynnega]

Ugh, capitalism.

[thistleingrey]

Oh, well, his Bede scholarship is fairly sound. (That sounds kind of catastrophically bad as a novel, like, did he not read any novels himself, which clearly he has, but.)

[nineweaving]

What a waste of good material. Not least of Trina Schart Hyman.

*hugs*

Nine

[genarti]

I grew up with the riddle song! Well, sort of -- we never sang it that often, because we weren't that good at coming up with spontaneous riddles, but my mom grew up on it, so I was aware of it. Partem portem perry dissentem, perry merry dictum, domini is the chorus I learned.

I believe you that the ending of The Coming of Pout is a soggy faceplant, but the book up until then sounds gloriously weird and cool!

[moon_custafer]

I can’t recall if I blogged about it and I’m too lazy to go look right now, but I recently read The Five Jars, which is M. R. James doing children’s fantasy rather than horror, and it had a similar problem with being enjoyable-up-till-the-landing-it-doesn’t-stick. (In The Five Jars’ case, the problem wasn’t overexplanation, it was more that it just kind of stops.)

[mrissa]

I learned that song from Noel Streatfeild's Gemma series and have never encountered it elsewhere. It's real! Gosh.

I wonder if I still like those books. I haven't reread them in my adult life.

[asakiyume]

Oh wow, this sounds just so wonderful! Trina Schart Hymen illustrations--I can almost see them just from your descriptions (once I post this I'm going to go look for images. it's funny and shivery and occasionally touches on the real, numinous strangeness of history and time --I mean! with a trickster and Sun and Moon siblings? What's not to love?? But the ending...

Would it work to simply not read the last chapter?