After a rather long and chaotic day (many undergraduates being foolish – getting distinctly irritated with some of them), reading Beckford's Vathek (and The Episodes of Vathek) for fun, late at night.
My taste for fantasy was established largely by Lin Carter's vast publishing venture in the 1970s, the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line. A lot of excellent books, many of which I still read – Cabell, Bramah, Mirrlees, etc. He published a version of Vathek, and I bought it, and I tried to read it – but couldn't make any sense of it; it was clearly far too adult for me at the time.
Well, I am now (obviously) older. Have come back to this quasi-decadent English classic after many years – and it is indeed well-written, fascinating, even rather funny in a dark way. The heavily perfumed decadence, the amazing antics of the selfish Caliph and his manipulative mother, and of course the absurd trials of his put-upon subjects – and why don't they rise up against him? but that's a very modern, democratic question. And the whole moves at such a strange pace – the careful, ornamented prose is just the vehicle for a headlong rush of incidents and surprises; despite the apparent calmness of any given sentence, the plot pulls you along without stopping. It's almost like reading a more sensual, spice-laden version of the antics of Caligula, Heliogabalus, Nero – it has that kind of twisty I-can't-believe-he-got-away-with-that flavor.
And there's a great advantage this book, written in the 1780s (contemporary with Mozart!), has over the late nineteenth century decadents – it doesn't waste a lot of time advertising its own gothic virtues to the reader: he never goes into boring Parisian ecstasies of how perverse he's being, he just lets his characters get on with it, doing dreadful things to everyone around without a shred of remorse. It really is rather funny.
Of course the ending isn't funny at all: the abrupt revelation that the sumptuous palace Vathek so desires, where he will know all and learn vast dark powers, is also hell – as Borges points out, his temptation is the same as his punishment, which makes for a neater economy than Faust's story. And the brilliant severity of the final, quickly closed door: that the denizens of hell have every shred of hope, love, and by implication joy, taken away from them in an instant – and this is after a period of waiting without being able to escape – that the flames of Eblis which burn their hearts alter them so that they cannot retroactively enjoy any memory of the things they did in life. It's a remarkable idea of hell, and an impressive one.
I see – finally, after years – why this is a minor classic....
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