(urth) Charles Williams

Mon Dec 17 09:53:04 PST 2012

I haven't read the rest of Powers's 'Faultlines' trilogy, but I greatly
look forward to it - everybody says they peter out a bit, but I'm just
excited to see what the heck he's going to do with time, space, ghosts, and
so on.  Wonderfully inventive and playful imagination in usually crisp and
enjoyable prose.

Blood Meridian has an extended tarot reading scene by circus performers
round a campfire that seems to suggest a lot philosophically (incredibly
dense novel).  I read an academic paper that very convincingly argued that
one of the main tarot predictions came true in detail late in the novel,
bringing the novel out of strict realism, the paper argued, and into
romance and myth.

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes: Williams pretty much invented modern "urban fantasy."

Yes!  And this only recently dawned on me.  And Lewis's essay brings this
out very effectively.

 GW: The problem with this it is hard to see where to stop. Later you say,
   "Gee, I should have included so and so," and you didn't think of that
   person at that time. J.R.R. Tolkein, just to start with. Charles
Williams,
   not as much as the others, but to some extent.

Thanks, Gwern!  Knew I'd seen that.

And for the record, I LOVE *some* of Charles Williams's poetry, especially
in the Arthurian cycle.  I mean, heck, at one point both Merlin and
Lancelot are werewolves!  (Lots of things in this cycle remind me of Wolfe
too.)

-DOJP

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 4:08 PM, Antonin Scriabin
<kierkegaurdian at gmail.com>wrote:

> That should have said "Tim" Powers, of course!  I have only read *Last
> Call *and *The Anubis Gates*, but I liked them both quite a bit.  I think
> that the latter is better, overall, but the former got off to an engrossing
> start.  Have you read any of the sequels to *Last Call*?  And what, out
> of curiosity, was the treatment of Tarot in *Blood Meridian?  *I haven't
> read anything by Cormac McCarthy.
>
> I think I might start with *War in Heaven* by Williams, or possibly *Descent
> into Hell *...they seem to be two of his more acclaimed novels.
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 11:02 AM, Daniel Petersen <
> danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Yes, those were two novels by each of them that I hadn't yet read, so I
>> read them both recently, hoping for resonances.  My first impression is
>> that they each took their own uniquely weird take on the tarot (about
>> which, though, I know little) with about zero overlap!  That's probably the
>> best I've read by Powers so far - excellent.  Williams's was a more minor
>> effort in my opinion but had one of my all-time favourite theological moves
>> (reminding me very much of the Wolfe's Outsider) and one of the best
>> freakish visions in the Williams canon - whole novel was worth it for that
>> alone.
>>
>> (I was subsequently weirded out to see the tarot feature in Cormac
>> McCarthy's *Blood Meridian* as well!)
>>
>> -DOJP
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 3:54 PM, Antonin Scriabin <
>> kierkegaurdian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Interesting! I am a fan of Tin Powers for sure, it would be great to
>>> check out his precursors. I notice that Last Call and The Greater Trumps
>>> have some similarities, for example. Thanks for the input!
>>> On Dec 17, 2012 10:51 AM, "Daniel Petersen" <
>>> danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Oh goodness, yes!  In terms of sheer intensity and originality of
>>>> imagination, I put him up there with Wolfe and Lafferty and Lewis and
>>>> Tolkien (as a theological myth-maker).  And I think he possibly veers more
>>>> into *weird* fiction (ala Lovecraft, Howard, Hodgson, Machen, etc.) than
>>>> the others.  Some of his visionary passages are flesh-crawling in their
>>>> numinous grotesquery.  He's not a great prose writer as a novelist and the
>>>> passages can come and go as to stylistic excellence.  But overall
>>>> incredibly enjoyable to me.  His tone is very middle-to-upper-class English
>>>> and and the settings are almost Edwardian - a bit like Chesterton or Sayers
>>>> if they were writing weird fiction.  In fact, Williams is one of the early
>>>> practitioners of 'Noird' fiction (noir detective + weird), at least in the
>>>> novel *War In Heaven*.  In some ways too he's a bit of a prototype for
>>>> Tim Powers's version of 'urban fantasy' or 'urban magical realism'.  Lewis
>>>> has an excellent essay on Williams's fiction in the collection *On
>>>> Stories*.
>>>>
>>>> I thought I remembered Wolfe mentioning Williams favourably in an
>>>> interview once.  Anyone know?
>>>>
>>>> -DOJP
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Antonin Scriabin <
>>>> kierkegaurdian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hello!  Is anyone familiar with the work of Charles Williams?  From a
>>>>> brief look online, he seems to have some similarities to MacDonald, and I
>>>>> thought there was a good chance some of you Wolfeans (?) would have some
>>>>> input.  Any suggestions for a novel of his to start with?
>>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Daniel Otto Jack Petersen
>>>>
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>>
>>
>> --
>> Daniel Otto Jack Petersen
>>
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-- 
Daniel Otto Jack Petersen
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