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The Postmodern Mariner

by Rhys Hughes (Goodreads Author)

4.36 of 5 stars 4.36 · rating details · 14 ratings · 5 reviews

A short book of implausible adventures featuring absurdities, anachronisms, exaggerations, outrageous puns, pirates, mythological beings, giant cups of tea and the occasional metafictional trick... Travel with Castor Jenkins and the Postmodern Mariner into worlds undreamed of by sane people!

160 pages

Published June 21st 2008 by Screaming Dreams

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Aug 09, 2009 Stephen Theaker rated it 4 of 5 stars

I've gone from The Smell of Telescopes, one of Rhys Hughes' earliest books, to this, one of his most recent. The decade or so that separates them is immediately obvious (or at least it seems to be - perhaps these stories date from the same period and I'm just imagining a difference!): the lines are cleaner, the twists less superfluous, the jokes funnier. There are three distinct sections (I rather wish The Smell of Telescopes had been divided up in the same way to save me a bit of brainache!).

Pa...more I've gone from The Smell of Telescopes, one of Rhys Hughes' earliest books, to this, one of his most recent. The decade or so that separates them is immediately obvious (or at least it seems to be - perhaps these stories date from the same period and I'm just imagining a difference!): the lines are cleaner, the twists less superfluous, the jokes funnier. There are three distinct sections (I rather wish The Smell of Telescopes had been divided up in the same way to save me a bit of brainache!).

Part One features seven amazing adventures of Castor Jenkins, the Baron Munchausen of Porthcawl, of which more below. Part Two is "The Lip Service", a tale of a man who posts himself to his girlfriend and ends up in a far-off magical lost parcels depot. It's funny, silly and rather sadder than the other stories, being all about the steady disappearance of love from the world.

Part Three is a novella about the Postmodern Mariner in person, "Rommel Cobra's Swimming Carnival", in which the Mariner (a blogger) goes in search of adventure with pirates in a gigantic cup of tea - adventure on the high teas, one might say! Astonishingly, in a novella filled to the brim with groan-worthy puns, Hughes neglects to make that one, the most obvious of all. I can only guess it's a deliberately open goal, left by way of invitation to the reader to join the game!

Two marvellous opening paragraphs from the Castor Jenkins stories should serve to give a taste of the pleasures of this book. "The Plucked Plant" begins thus: "Castor Jenkins has a bad habit of advocating outlandish ideas and even his mildest beliefs are routinely uncommon. If you ask him about the Primeval Soup he'll insist it was leek and potato. He denies the existence of the colour purple, the number seven and the note G#."

And "Interstellar Domestic" opens with: "Nobody outside Porthcawl, and hardly anyone inside it, can remember that Wales once enjoyed greater success than the combined efforts of the Americans, Russians and Chinese. ... What's more, it was done on the cheap, without even the need to build a spaceship."

If you like those extracts, you'll enjoy this book immensely. The book reviews itself! But I should try to contribute; what I like about these stories is that they are all about extrapolation. I like stories where one thing follows on from another, where premises are built upon, notions are followed through. For example, the way the apocalyptic ending of Joe Hill's Gunpowder follows logically from its beginnings, or the way the protagonists in a Racinian play are sped towards their doom, or the way Superman shaves his beard with his heat vision.

The speciality of the stories in this book is taking a silly (and sometimes not-so-silly) premise and following it through to an apparently logical but ludicrous conclusion - and that's why I loved them so much. A review of the same author's The Crystal Cosmos dismissed it briefly: "It begins, beautifully. Alas, from here on out it descends into a nonsensical mess." Not having read that book of course I can't argue with the conclusion, but it's worth noting that not all nonsense is a mess, and nonsense isn't necessarily something into which a story descends: sometimes it's something to which a story carefully builds, and that's certainly the case in this collection.

The book's one flaw for me is that it groups together three chunks of storytelling that have little in common. Each section is individually quite fantastic, but they don't quite add up to a pleasing whole. A complete collection of Castor Jenkins stories would have been even better, or a set of three novellas, but as it stands the novella feels like an unnecessary adjunct to the Jenkins stories, or vice versa. Certainly, the unique and very admirable Castor Jenkins stories deserve to be in a book with his name on the cover.

And while we're talking of covers, a note of praise for Steve Upham's marvellous giant octopus! Certainly, the design of this book does it proud, as does the quality of its production.(less)

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Feb 25, 2012 Jason Rolfe rated it 5 of 5 stars

I am currently re-reading The Postmodern Mariner by Rhys Hughes. I've read it several times already, but it's such a clever book it begs to be re-read often. As Moorcock says (of Hughes), "He makes the metaphysical political, the personal incredible, and the comic hints at subtle pain." There are books out there that get far more attention than they probably deserve. This book deserves far more attention than it gets. It's difficult to find now. Fortunately a new book is slated for release this...more

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Sep 30, 2010 Dan rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories

While some of the humor in these short stories emerges out of intertextual references, there have been instances of intertextuality in fictions by other writers that I have found more satisfying, including D.M. Thomas's The White Hotel, Stephen Dobyns's The Wrestler's Cruel Study, Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair and Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words: while the references in those latter works are motivated by the kinds of narratives in which they occur, Hughes’s allusions frequently seem gratu...more

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Apr 27, 2012 Desmond rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book has an ambitious and a completely original concept.

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Feb 25, 2009 Adam rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: literature-fantastique, black-comedy, steampunkery

Light in tone and very funny but still dangerously reality warping, this another wild and almost indescribable story collection from that Welsh captain of the imagination, Rhys Hughes. From Flann O’Brien style tall tales, Monty Python surrealist romps, to Jack Vance styled picaresques these will give you a treasure trove of groan worthy puns and bizarre characters. A joke that seems obvious but appears here for the first time is that of China Melville (sailing the Perdido of course) searching fo...more

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About Rhys Hughes

A writer of Fantasy and Magic Realism who often uses comedy and absurdism to examine philosophical issues. Known for his original ideas, intricate plots and entertaining wordplay.

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The Astral Disruptor (Sampietro Mischief #1)

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