I've loved Marcus Sedgwick's books since first discovering 'The Book of Dead Days' more than twenty years ago - such a beautiful looking book, and a gothic, beautifully written story. I think I've read most of his work, but not this one till now: his 2018 novel 'The Monsters We Deserve'. It's a strange tale - a horror writer with the initials 'MS' (just like Mary Shelley) hides out in a cabin in the winter woods and tries to write. He muses on the novel 'Frankenstein' and why he doesn't like it and later receives three mysterious visitors. It is a novel full of darkness and foreboding, isolation and mental instability; a contemplation on writing, creation, and monsters. There is nothing overtly terrible that happens, but it is imbued with a sense of creeping unease that deepens as the story progresses.
"If a life can be ruined in a single moment, a moment of betrayal, or violence, or ill-luck, then why can a life not also be saved, be worth living, be made, by just a few pure moments of perfection?"
Our true enemies are ourselves: our fears, our prejudices. We must, each of us, rise up and overthrow the tyranny found inside that keeps us fearing what we do not know, because from that fear comes hate. That is our true enemy: our lack of understanding; not only of other people, but of ourselves.
Marcus Sedgwick & Julian Sedgwick, Voyages in the Underworld of Orpheus Black
Monsters lurk in every culture's life blood - the history of the world is as much the history of its monsters as its angels, and who is the more fascinating: Elizabeth Bathory and her blood-bathing, or Mother Theresa and her poor? Vlad Tepes and his impalings, or Saint Francis and his birds? I wish I could give you better answers, I really do, but monsters throng about us; they always have.
This sounds fabulous: a podcast from one of OGOM’s favourite collaborators, the award-winning novelist Marcus Sedgwick. Marcus writes: On December 30th I’ll be a guest on The Folklore Podcast…
117. Voyages in the Underworld of Orpheus Black, by Marcus Sedgwick, Julian Sedgwick, and Alexis Deacon
Owned?: No, library
Page count: 319
My summary: A conscientious objector and firefighter in World War Two, Harry Black is caught between two worlds. He wants to be an artist, but the War put paid to that. All around him - his father, his brother - want him to be a fighter. But there is another story underneath, an older story. And it threatens to consume him.
My rating: 5/5
My commentary:
So anyone who knows me might know that I have something of a Thing for mythology, and Greek mythology falls under my interests. I am not particularly ashamed to say that when I saw the title of today’s book, I grabbed it instantly without putting much thought into that decision. I didn’t even read the back, I didn’t know it was about WWII until I began reading it for real, before bed one night. And, friend, I didn’t put it down until I was done.
How do I start? First, this book is a combination of prose fiction, in the style of Harry Black’s diary, illustation, also from Harry’s diary, and poetry, supposedly written by Orpheus as he follows and takes hold of Harry in his travels. The illustrations are moody and detailed and always add to the tone of the piece, even if they don’t literally depict what is happening in the narrative at that point. See, Harry took a blow to the head, and isn’t quite sure if all he’s experiencing is real. It all started with a fiddler on a bomb site, and now he’s calling himself Orpheus. He tries to rationalise it, but we the reader know better. We can see the poems along the text directly written by Orpheus. We can see how his journey is mimicking that mythical trip to the Underworld - a young man descending below the earth to save a dead soul, in this case his brother, who was in a pub that suffered a direct bomb hit. Nobody believes he’s alive but Harry, who is convinced that he’s buried beneath the rubble. Mostly because he dropped a glass eye in the rubble and saw his brother through it.
This all adds to the dreamlike quality of this book. Harry goes from place to place disjointedly, not quite sure how he got there. He talks to people who might not have been real, but if they weren’t then how did he get out of situations where they helped him? The poetry sections are philosophical and meandering, watching poor Harry with a voyeur‘s eye, almost mocking him with their inability to give him any real, active help.
The juxtaposition of war and myth is fascinating to me. True, there is war in many a myth, but it tends to be the ancient war of arrows and swords and egos, not this modern war of bombs and burning, things that people alive today experienced. And this book doesn’t subscribe to the usual mythology of war, either. Its main character is a conscientious objector, who sees war for what it truly is, chaos and mess and death without purpose. His blind struggle to save the people he can conceptualise - his brother, the little girl he befriends in the hospital - represents that grasping effort of humanity to preserve life even in this chaos. It brings the reality of war into this mythical framework.
And that leads me to the final thing I find so interesting about this story - its use of reality. Remember how I said that Harry took a blow to the head? He’s not sure how much of what he’s seen was real, and neither are we, the reader. There are gaps in his knowledge. Can he really see through glass eyes? How did he get out of the Underground shelter? Was there really someone rowing? Is the fiddler real? Is he really Orpheus? And all of these questions are brought smashing through into our worldview at the end. (Spoilers, obviously.) Yes, this book was written...by Harry’s brother, after his death, from his diary. You know from the Orpheus framework that only one of them will survive the ascent from the Underworld, and it is Harry who succumbs to his head wound and dies. His brother picks up the narrative. It’s he who wrote the poems. This reality, explaining none of the fantastical elements in Harry’s diary (did he really see a ghost?) reinterprets Harry’s story as well as the Orpheus myth. Ultimately, this is a story of a man who loves his brother, and imagined what it might have been like to be at his side as he struggled and fought and searched for him. A man who made his brother into a mythical hero.
I can’t honestly express how much I liked this book. Go read it, please.
