The Guardian's Blog, page 189

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 22: The Eyes of the Dragon

I hated this fantasy yarn when I first read it – but now I know that genre-swapping can make great writers grow

There's a lot of debate in some circles about exactly what sort of author Stephen King is. Genres are either dismissive of him, or claim ownership: people who dislike horror claim that he's not a horror writer; people who dislike fantasy seem willing to pretend that The Dark Tower series just doesn't exist; and some seem to dislike the books he's written that take on a more literary bent, simply because they don't feature those things that go bump in the night.

I like to think that I've grown past that now, and that I can take King for who he is, and on a book-by-book basis. I like to think I can do that with anything I read now, frankly – genre be damned. When I was 13, however, that was impossible for me: he wrote horror novels. Anything else, I wasn't really interested.

I hated The Hobbit. I just couldn't imagine why anybody would want to read such a twee, simpering narrative, overwritten and unimaginative. I didn't like it one bit. I was told to try The Lord of the Rings, as something more grown-up, but that was, somehow, worse; just a mess of nonsense to me.

So, when I was going through King's work and came to the cover of this – which proudly declared, over a picture of a wizard and some fancy patterns, that this was "a classic fantasy from the master storyteller" – I just had no interest in it. I brought my own baggage to those 400 pages of dragons and wizards and traditional, fantasy-quest narrative, and I (perhaps inevitably) hated it. Maybe, of all the King novels I have to reread for this project, this was the one I was dreading most; and I'm not alone in that. Many King fans dislike it, simply because it strays into a genre they don't see as his.

What did I specifically hate? I hated the tone. I hated the narrator of this novel-told-as-story, an omniscient wizard (I assumed) with a personality. I even disliked the main characters, Peter and Thomas, for being whiny and having a curious lack of agency. And the ending, which just seemed to fade into nothingness after building up to what, in my mind, should have been a terrific climax, a battle to end all battles. Villains, I thought, should not escape. They should not go unpunished.

One of the issues was that, for some reason, I had read The Eyes of the Dragon before I read The Stand. Don't ask me why – it makes no sense to me either – and yet there it is. So, the fact that the bad guy in the novel is Randall Flagg, antagonist of The Stand and The Dark Tower series, was lost on me. I don't know what that would have changed back then. It would have blown my mind, likely. I don't remember making the connection when I read The Stand, because I think I was trying to forget the earlier fantasy novel I wanted to pretend my hero hadn't written. I shelved it and never looked back. I don't even own my first print copy of it any more.

Which brings us to the present, and to me coming back to this novel for the first time in 20 years. Now, I have read and enjoyed a lot of fantasy novels – even Lord of the Rings. Now – post-Stand, post-Dark Tower books, post-every other hint of Flagg or mid-world in King's other books – I was able to approach this novel in a completely different way.

It's dedicated to Ben (son of Peter) Straub and Naomi King, his then-13-year-old daughter. King wrote it for her, to give her something of his to read. He put her and Ben in the novel as minor characters (even marrying them off in the end), and he created a narrator that, when you pick apart the voice, isn't some wizard at all; it's King himself. It's a storyteller, trying to ease in ideas and concepts, and trying to parlay some of what makes him a storyteller on to the page itself. Compare the voice with the one he uses in his introductions – his "constant reader" invocations – it's the same.

The book is a fantasy novel that feels, for the most part, as if it's aimed at a young adult audience. I couldn't escape the thought in this reread, though I think it made me far prefer the novel this time around.

The narrative voice is what carries it, doing some wonderful things – particularly with regard to narrative point of view, allowing us inside Flagg's head in a way that we are not permitted in his other appearances, and we see him as nearly human, confused and flawed, with just the beginnings of his malignant evil – and come the novel's final chapter, it feels almost as if King is sitting next to you, shutting a book and telling you it's time for bed.

There are life lessons here ("Did they all live happily ever after? They did not. No one ever does, in spite of what the stories might say."), and some rounding off of individual character narratives in way that feels almost CS Lewis-ish.

But then there's also, if you know how Flagg's story ends, a real darkness – and it probably wouldn't be a King novel without it. This is the first chronological appearance of Flagg in King's work, set before The Stand. So when Thomas and Dennis go off in search of Flagg and, as the book says, confront him, we are not told what happens. Instead, the story is left open and hanging, to be revisited; and we know, because we're his constant readers – because Flagg exists past this tale, and into so many other novels – that the story King would tell us simply cannot have a happy ending.

Now I know, of course, that King didn't only write horror novels. He writes a lot of them, sure, but there's so much of his output that is somewhat unclassifiable. The Eyes of the Dragon is not. It's a fantasy novel, through and through. But that doesn't mean it should be shunned. Every writer wants to stretch their wings, and we should let them: it's how great writers can grow.

Now, I can see this as the fun exercise in fantasy genre storytelling that it is. It doesn't need to be The Stand, or It. Not everything can be. Many King fans can't see that. The fact this book exists seems have made some fans (going by some of the more extreme Amazon and Goodreads reviews) not very happy at all; and some Kng fans write it off to this day without having read it, simply because of the shift to another genre.

But maybe their anger is a good thing. Without it, we might not have had Misery – a book about a novelist whose fans won't let him write anything other than what they know and love him for. As The Eyes of the Dragon says at its close, however: "That is another tale, for another day …"

Next: From one Randall Flagg book to another – it's The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three.

Stephen KingHorrorFantasyFictionJames Smythe
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Guardian Nosy Crow book club: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

Join the Guardian Nosy Crow book club as we discuss Patrick Ness's A Monster Calls

The Guardian Nosy Crow book group kicked off last week with a lively discussion of RJ Palacio's Wonder – at the physical book group in the Crow's nest, on the blog and on Twitter (#NCGkids). Nosy Crow's Kate Watson has written an excellent summary of the debate, which covered the book's sentimentality, structural flaws and much more.

The book club is back again next month with another great book. This time it's A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness – the only book to have won both the Carnegie and the Greenaway medals. Inspired by an idea by the late Siobhan Dowd, it is a dark, moving and painfully funny tale of a young boy coming to terms with loss.

It's a book that's ripe for discussion, being unusual in so many ways. We might think about what kind of book is it – fantasy? The book was created from a set of notes left behind by Siobhan Dowd but is it really, as Frank Cottrell Boyce suggests in his review, "easy to trace Dowd's influence"? It's a beautiful book (please, please buy the illustrated version) so we'll probably consider how the illustrations interact with the text and how necessary they are. The emotional journeys of the characters will be up for debate, alongside the relationship between Conor and the Monster. And, following last week's start, we'll undoubtedly be asking for a show of hands to reveal who blubbed (early confession – it completely floored me).

What are you waiting for?

Read the first chapter Listen to a podcast with Patrick Ness reading from and talking about A Monster Calls Learn more about how Patrick and illustrator Jim Kay worked together See a gallery of Jim Kay's illustrations Buy A Monster Calls at the Guardian bookshop

I'll be at the Crow's Nest in London on Thursday 11 July from 6.30pm, reporting back live on the face-to-face discussion in the comments thread below and feeding in your comments online to the group there. You can also get involved on Twitter, using #NCGkids – tweeted comments will be fed back into the discussion here and at the Crow's Nest.

If you have any other questions or talking points about A Monster Calls, please add them in the comments below for everyone to consider on the night. And there's no need to wait for 11 July – you can post your comments and get the discussion going straight away. But do come back to follow the discussion and contribute live on the night if you can, too. Happy reading!

Children and teenagersPatrick NessCarnegie medalMichelle Pauli
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The best books on Egypt: start your reading here | Pushpinder Khaneka

A journey through Egyptian fiction starts with the 1919 revolution against the British and ends with the Arab spring

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

Palace Walk is the first novel in Mahfouz's sumptuous Cairo trilogy, a three-generation saga set in the early 20th century. The trilogy, regarded as his masterwork, runs from after the first world war to Nasser's overthrow of the ancien regime in 1952. The rich, intense story offers an inside view of modern Egypt as the country attempts to emerge from British occupation and forge its own identity. Palace Walk tells the story up to the 1919 revolution against the British.

Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, a prosperous merchant, rules over his wife, three sons and two daughters with an iron hand. He runs his family strictly according to Qur'anic principles and demands unquestioning obedience. But his own behaviour is far from irreproachable as he indulges his desires for fine wine and voluptuous women.

Mahfouz paints an intimate portrait of the al-Jawads with humour and great attention to detail. Their trials and tribulations mirror those of their changing country. As Egypt struggles to end colonial rule, the al-Jawad children struggle to break free from their father's tyrannical control.

Mahfouz, the Arab world's most celebrated novelist, won the Nobel prize in 1988. He survived an assassination attempt by Islamists in 1994, and died in 2006.

The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany

Sex and the city loom large in the lives of the Yacoubian building's inhabitants. The once grand, now decaying apartment block in central Cairo houses a rich cast of characters, whose stories Al Aswany weaves together to portray contemporary Egyptian life.

The taboo-busting novel tells of Cairo's residents going about their lives and encountering corruption, police brutality, sexism, homophobia and religious extremism – all seething under the surface of then president Hosni Mubarak's sclerotic regime. Among the bustling building's residents are poor squatters living on the roof, an ageing playboy looking fondly to a bygone era, a gay newspaper editor in love with a policeman, a bitter doorkeeper's son who seeks solace in militant Islam, and a woman who puts up with sexual harassment at work so that she can keep her job and support her family.

The novel reflects the frustration Egyptians feel in a society where money and influence are prized above all else; it offers a damning indictment of the powers that be.

A dentist by profession, Al Aswany opened his first clinic in Cairo's real-life Yacoubian building. He says dentistry is his "window on Egyptian society", which is no doubt what spurred him to write one of the biggest-selling novels in the Arab world.

Egypt on the Brink by Tarek Osman

Egyptian writer and commentator Osman provides the backstory on why people took to the streets to oust Mubarak in 2011. He casts a shrewd eye over the six decades since Gamal Abdel Nasser's 1952 revolution, taking stock of all the main players – Islamists, liberal capitalists, Coptic Christians, the army and young Egyptians. The last are a force to be reckoned with: the almost three-quarters of the population aged under 35 provided the "fuel for the revolt" that toppled Mubarak.

Nasser galvanised national – and Arab – pride, but ultimately failed to deliver what was promised. He created "a suffocating military bureaucratic system … [and] Egypt remained throughout [Anwar] Sadat's and Mubarak's administrations at heart a police state with a sad human rights record".

Egypt's patrons in Washington – the country is the biggest recipient of US aid in the Middle East after Israel – chose to turn a blind eye to the sham democracy because of the oft-raised spectre of the Muslim Brotherhood seizing power and forming a hostile Islamist regime.

So, has Egypt seen off its last strongman? Disturbingly, Osman says: "There is much in Egyptian history and traditions that predisposes Egyptians to expect and accept authoritarian rule."

• Read our World Library series on Vietnam, Colombia and Nigeria

EgyptMiddle East and North AfricaAfricaPushpinder Khaneka
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A note on Neil Gaiman's politics

The Sandman author answers some questions we didn't have time for on Monday: is his work political, and where do his personal allegiances lie?

At Monday's live appearance by Neil Gaiman, we tried to put as many of your questions to the author of The Sandman, American Gods and The Ocean at the End of the Lane as possible. But there was one good question we didn't have time for – this one from crazyfatguy: "I'm not sure if Neil Gaiman would want to answer this but I'm curious as to how he would describe himself politically and whether he feels any of his works can be read as political allegories or if he prefers that they are read as apolitical narratives."

We put this to Neil after the event was over, and he was keen to answer. He said: "When I was doing comics in the late 80s and early 90s, I used to get flak from all of the other British comics writers – well, not from the writers but from the press – for being the one that was obviously not political at all in any way. Because that was the point where you had comics like Revolver going on and everybody was doing big, heart-on-their-sleeves, 'wasn't Maggie Thatcher a bad thing and we hate her' comics at the time.

"And I was writing Sandman. And 10 years later, in 2003, during the American invasion of Iraq, there were articles being printed and reprinted around the world with panels from a 1993 Sandman that I wrote called Ramadan, about the relationship between a mythical version of Baghdad and the city under war and the city under siege. It was written during the first Iraq war but it was suddenly being read and commented on."

Similar, Gaiman said, was the Sandman story A Game of You, which featured the first transsexual character in mainstream comics, and still today gets "praised and criticised" and argued over. "And I feel like my personal feeling at the time when I was writing it, which is that the personal is political, seems to have proved out."

He added: "Nobody's really talking about the comics that were meant to be overtly political, but they are still talking about the comics that I was doing in which the personal was political."

I asked him if he had ever felt he should bow to the pressure to write something along the lines of Alan Moore's hugely influential dystopian series V for Vendetta, which features a rebellion against a fascist government in a future Britain.

"No," he said. "I've never actually got up and gone, 'I want to do something like V for Vendetta – but then that may be because Alan Moore had already done V for Vendetta and done it better than anybody else could possibly do it … Alan Moore has had no urge to do that since either."

Gaiman added that he felt From Hell, Moore's "dissection of Victorian culture from highest to lowest through the medium of Jack the Ripper", was much more political than Vendetta: "That is taking apart how things worked, what was wrong, and what needed to change."

He concluded, "I still don't think of myself as a hugely political writer," but explained a bit about his personal politics, saying that "in British terms, I am somewhere in the fuzzy middle, of 'why can't we all be nice to each other?', and 'I really don't like people exploiting other people" – yet in American terms, he said, "that puts me so far to the left of any political party that my politics out there are considered irrelevant".

Neil GaimanAlan MooreComics and graphic novelsFictionPaul Owen
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Neil Gaiman in conversation – live coverage

Live coverage as acclaimed graphic novel, fantasy and children's author Neil Gaiman talks to Guardian's Claire Armitstead tonight from 7pm BST / 2pm ET

Paul Owen

       

Neil Gaiman in conversation

Acclaimed graphic novel, fantasy and children's author Neil Gaiman talks to Guardian's Claire Armitstead

Paul Owen

       

Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?

The space to talk about the books you are reading, and find out which ones we are reviewing

Greetings, all well I trust? A warm welcome to the new faces in the thread, it's great to see you.

In no particular order, here's a round up of some the book you have been reading recently, and what you thought of them:

elmondo2012:

I was never a great fan of Superman (but read a bit about philosophy) and found this book at the weekend:

Superman and Philosophy: What Would the Man of Steel Do

Absolutely fascinating stuff about everything to do with Supes.

All of the chapters (especially "Could Superman Have Joined the Third Reich? The Importance and Shortcomings of a Moral Upbringing", "Superman: From Anti-Christ to Christ Type" and "World's Finest Philosophers:" Superman and Batman on Human Nature") are brilliant.

atrociful:

Just finished 'The Year of the Flood' by Margaret Atwood, and still immersed in that world (not to mention trying not to count down the days until 'Madaddam' is released later this year).

JudgeDAmNation:

'Money' - Amis is one of my all-time favourite authors, so I thought it was about time I read what is widely regarded as his best novel. While it is too soon to say whether I personally think it better than the others that I've read, it is the first one to make me laugh out loud, and for long periods of time, both at the slapstick set-pieces and the withering precision of his prose. Am deliberately trying to make myself take it slowly and savour it, rather than rushing through as I normally do

TotaalWolf:

Reading EF Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful".

As a read its not particularly great - quite repetitive really and he can get a little bogged down sometimes - but the overall strength of his ideas and vision, his clarity of thought (for the most part) and the resounding common sense of his approach to economics is laudable and, in its own way, exhilarating. His particular criticism of modern economics and our over reliance as a society on scientific knowledge and progress at the expense of the humanities (and in particular a consideration of how we should live) is refreshing even though the book is 30+ years old.

saoifre:

From way up-thread, books dealing with Afghanistan, I'd highly recommend the Mulberry Empire by Philip Hensher, the story of the 'Army of the Indus' heading off to Kabul to meddle disastrously in the 1840's, the 1st Afghan War: strong resonances to more recent events and helps to provide a context. The diaries of Fanny Eden, the then Governor General's sister, are a great red too, again lots of insight into the time and very funny as only the Victorians, intentionally, could be.

A selection of books we're reviewing this week

Fiction:
• • Time Past and Time Present by Deirdre Madden
• The Professor of Truth by James Robertson
• Cooking with Bones by Jess Richards
• All is Silence by Manuel Rivas

Non-fiction:
• Isaac and Isaiah by David Caute
• Attention! by Josh Cohen
• The Unwinding by George Packer
• Our Church by Roger Scruton
• A Place in the Country by WG Sebald
• Semantic Polarities and Psychopathologies in the Family by Valeria Ugazio
• Men from the Men from the Ministry by Simon Thurley

Guardian readersHannah Freeman
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Writing in a dandelion future

According to Neil Gaiman, writers should be less mammalian. But can you build a literary career by casting your work into the wind?

You might have noticed the Books site going a little strange last week, after we handed the keys to Neil Gaiman. But it wasn't his weird podcast, or the collaborative story or even the haunting images of his friend Dave McKean which got me thinking – it was his bleak assessment of the future for writers.

Gaiman turned futurologist at the Guardian's morning conference, where he sketched out a version of the speech he gave at the London Book Fair, outlining Cory Doctorow's notion of the dandelion career. Now that the cost of distributing a piece of work is basically zero, Doctorow suggests writers should be more like dandelions. Instead of lavishing time and energy on each project, like a mammal nurturing its young, they should do many and various things and cast them into the wind, hoping some of them will find fertile ground.

Now this all sounds very lovely and creative and organic, but the point of the dandelion's evolutionary strategy is that most of its seeds fail. That may be fine if you have the kind of following that sends people dashing after your tabletop doodles, but how is this going to work for authors who can't match Gaiman's reach or commercial heft? How are they ever going to make enough money to live on? It's even worse for writers who are only just getting started. The self-publishing revolution may have blasted down the barriers to publication, but how does a young author find the time among paying work and other commitments to produce enough seeds for one of them to stand a chance of flowering into a career which will give them time to, um, write?

Gaiman's answer is a stark "I don't know." In historical terms the ability for anyone to make a living out of telling stories is only comparatively recent, he argues, the printing press and copyright law combining for a couple of hundred years to make it possible for writers to distribute their work widely enough to find an audience, while retaining enough control to ensure that audience consisted (mostly) of paying customers. For Gaiman the logic of digital distribution has blown that cosy settlement apart. "Maybe it was just a blip."

If writing is a craft which takes a certain amount of time to learn – as many first novels attest – then what does the landscape of literature look like after the blip has passed? Is there anything of value which will be lost? Gaiman speaks himself of how he started by ventriloquising writers he admired, how it took him time to find his own voice. Unless some model can be found to reward the kind of mastery which takes time to develop, our dandelion future will be full of writers whose first seeds fell on stony ground, of authors who never found the time to write the second act.

FictionPublishingRichard Lea
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Local culture is keeping battered Britain alive in the recession

Outside the established, metropolitan-style literary festivals, small cultural initiatives are the lifeblood of our country

I live and work in London, and have done for years. This makes me inescapably a member of the metropolitan literati, an abused minority. Still, if you're based in London, especially during this great recession, your perspective on culture, finance and society is, perforce, a highly privileged one.

Never mind the Olympics. London continues to enjoy an economic and cultural microclimate. On a good day it can feel like the best of times. Bars and restaurants are busy. Browsers crowd the city's book stores. In the evening, the West End flourishes, tides of concert-goers flow in and out of Covent Garden, the South Bank and the Wigmore Hall, and visiting Martians would have to pinch themselves to connect the city's life with what they might have read in the newspapers about the recession.

Of course, it's an illusion. These are the worst of times. The country is hopelessly broke, with deteriorating public finances. The arts are being squeezed (or neglected) as never before. Book publishing is in crisis. The minute you leave London, you discover a world burdened by debt, cuts, decay, and stagnation.

The UK, however, is an extraordinarily resilient society, with age-old powers of adaptability. As this recession shows no sign of lifting, I've begun to notice that it's culture (the thing to which politicians pay lipservice, but have no time or resources for) which is keeping Britain's battered communities alive, especially outside the south east of England.

Last week, for instance, I visited Manchester at the invitation of the Scribble literary festival.

Most festivals (Bath, Edinburgh, Buxton, Hay, etc) essentially replicate a metropolitan literary experience, in a tent or church hall. But Scribble, which gets together in the Friends Meeting House, is rather different. It's much more hands-on, populist, and down-to-earth; much less "literary".

Scribble is the brainchild of Rick Walker from Cartwheel, an arts organisation which was established in 1984. Based in Heywood, this impressive arts organisation works across Greater Manchester, providing nearly 500 sessions last year, of which some 350 were creative writing workshops.

A vibrant symbol of grass-roots creativity in hard times, Scribble has somehow promoted personal contact with more than 40,000 people, through the festival and its quarterly magazine, either live or in print.

This is multiculturalism at its best. In my polyglot audience were writers from Mirpur in north-east Pakistan, from Nigeria, India and Britain. Afterwards, I met Shamshad Khan, who is wonderfully symbolic of an emergent new literary culture. Born in Manchester, Khan is a young poet whose "mother's tongue" is Urdu, but she writes in English and is published by the innovative East Anglian independent, Salt. Benjamin Zephaniah should be pleased. He has said that he "prayed to the god of poetry that [Khan's] work would be put into print."

Khan's poetry has also featured on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. At the Scribble event, Khan was promoting her new collection, Megalomaniac, a slim volume that signals the arrival of a passionate new voice.

In the past, Scribble has been funded mainly by the Big Lottery Fund and the Arts Council of England, but it's now nearing the end of its current three-year phase, and the future is uncertain.

Not that you'd know it. On the day I attended, the place was rocking. The evening session saw some extraordinary performances by young people from Leeds and Manchester: displays not just of verbal gymnastics and the feats of memory, but the enjoyment of language and the testing of poetic conventions, sometimes to breaking point.

One common worry– about the dumbing down of culture and language through the IT revolution – often crops up at festivals, but not here. There was no evidence of dumbing down among Scribble's digital generation. In fact, the reverse. What I found in the workshop sessions surrounding the main events, was vivid evidence of writers and performers competing fiercely, as artists always have, for audiences' attention, and yes, remuneration.

Shirley May, director of Young Identity, an umbrella group for young writers in Manchester, especially those from Moss Side and Longsight, made the point with some passion that, small though the rewards might be, some of her students were opting to become poets and performers rather than study law at university.

And here's the digital dividend. The Arts Council may be in retreat. The coalition government's public sector cuts may be striking at the bone-marrow of the Manchester community. There may, in short, be virtually no money or resources available. But still, through the internet all kinds of small cultural initiatives are flourishing like tiny, but vital, blood transfusions within the body politic throughout the region.

In the past, I have been rather sceptical about feel-good phrases like "the creative economy". But, during my visit, the local Arts Council literature relationship manager, Alison Boyle, made a powerful case for dynamic local initiatives. Boyle, who develops literature for the Arts Council across the north east of England, says: "Advocating for the future pubic funding of the arts is something everyone can do. You don't need to be a writer to understand that 14p per week coming out of your pocket for publicly funded art is worth it."

Fine words, matched with enhanced creativity. Northerners will say, "Where's the surprise? This is what we do." Yes, indeed. Here in Manchester, in the midst of the Scribble festival, I caught a glimpse of a vivid, more vigorous, and intellectually richer, society renewed by a democratised literary culture, plugged into the world wide web. With any luck, it will not be snuffed out by Mr Osborne's war on the national deficit.

Arts Council EnglandPoetryRecessionRobert McCrum
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Luminary by RS Thomas: Poem of the week

With its melodious free verse, this love poem's imagery extends beyond an individual woman to wider nature

Among the publications marking the centenary of RS Thomas's birth in 1913, especially interesting is an edition by Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies of 138 rediscovered poems. Published recently by Bloodaxe, Uncollected Poems represents what the editors consider to be the best of the work that Thomas, by accident or design, omitted from his individual collections. For both general and specialist readers of this popular but confusingly prolific poet, the selection provides a welcome opportunity, to see him emerge in a clearer and slightly less familiar outline.

Previously scattered among little magazines, limited editions, etc, the chronologically ordered poems represent every stage of their author's career (except juvenilia) and sound all his major themes: religion, the land and nationalism, Daniel Corkery's triad of foci for emergent Irish consciousness are no less significant for this Welsh writer in English. So Iago Prytherch, the hill shepherd character partly inspired by Patrick Kavanagh's peasant-protagonist in "The Great Hunger", appears briefly in these pages, "wandering in the dew" and strangely exalted. The less stony aspects of Thomas and Wales manifest themselves elsewhere, for example in additions to the cache of love poems for Mildred (Elsi) Eldridge, the English artist to whom Thomas was married for 51 years. "Luminary" is one of these.

Composed around 1980, it appeared in 2002 in a limited edition pamphlet of family poems, Ringless Fingers, published by the poet's son, Gwydion Thomas (Frangipani Press, Bangkapi, Thailand). Uncollected Poems includes two other fine pieces from this pamphlet.

"Luminary" is free verse at its most melodious. It begins with a spondee (two stressed syllables) asserting the ceremonious quality of the address to "My luminary". The tempo's now set for a slow relishing of vowels and consonants. "Luminary" itself is a word of complex sounds and meanings. Though it doesn't recur again, the rays of its four lovely syllables seem to envelop the whole poem. Usually a noun but also an adjective, its primary, metaphorical definition is "someone who enlightens or influences others". It also has a literal meaning, pertaining to light, and both senses are entwined here. Monosyllables contrast with such Latinate resonance: "star", "light", "noon", "sun" and "sky." Small, but spacious, these words extend the field of luminosity, and perhaps recall Wordsworth's Lucy, "Fair as a star when only one/Is shining in the sky." Then, with the sensuous "l" sound in a minor key, the word "lowers" descends like a cloud.

The "noon when there is no sun/and the sky lowers" is as much a state of mind as weather. Afternoon, for the contemplative orders, was traditionally the most difficult time of day, when slothful despondency (acedia) was most tempting. So, at this point in the poem, the illumination is drawn inward. The following apostrophe, to "My balance", is indicative. This luminary restores personal mental balance, inevitably threatened when loss of balance is a historical condition, and the world itself has "gone off/ joy's standard". Those two plain words, "balance" and "standard", with their connotations of exact measurement, give the abstract transcendence of "joy" an anchorage. The polyptoton ("joy", "joys") neatly illustrates the verbal balancing.

Thomas's use of caesura is always agile. "My light", "My balance" and "Yours the face" subvert the dead hand of the end-stop and ensure the flow of rhythmic energy from one short line to the next.

"Yours the face" introduces a stylistic bridge-passage, allowing the poem to modulate from apostrophe to reminiscence, from an abbreviated to a more expansive syntax. Each word of the short declaration is perfectly placed. As for the Elizabethan poets, love originates in the eyes. Recognition is followed by the wonderfully silent and graceful invitation: "Come, my eyes/ said…" The poem becomes an epithalamion, with a pre-lapsarian freshness shining through the little scene. "The morning/of a world" suggests a comparison of the couple to Adam and Eve in an Edenic first morning. Does the proximity of "world" and "dew" recall the "world of dew" trope which signals transience for the haiku poets? Perhaps, but only fleetingly.

The wedding ceremony might be a Druidic one. Foliage ("a green altar"), and birdsong create a sanctuary from the Church. The thrush officiates, as if in a folk poem. Characteristically, Thomas finds his sacred, unfettered space out of doors.

Anticlerical and anti-technological assertions echo one another in lines 18-20. The capitalisation reminds us that the Machine is, for Thomas, a satanic force. (His ideal Wales would be an Amish community, as far as technology is concerned.) "Stale" and "tarnish" may not strike the reader initially as very interesting or precise verbs; vows can be staled, of course, but these are "gossamer vows" – and how can they be tarnished? Perhaps the vows themselves are seen as bright objects in a fragile pastoral. The pre-emptive metaphor is clarified by its development, from gossamer to flint and platinum, the latter a metal particularly resistant to tarnishing by heat or chemicals.

The subject of the final, and longest, sentence is the speaker. The vows are his, mulled over in exalted solitude, found to have achieved triumphant durability over time. But what is finally emphasised is that the vows are still sensed as unoppressive, "lighter than platinum." And now, for the first time, the plural possessive pronoun, "ours", appears, and one and one make two. In another twist, the "ringless fingers" of the couple prove even the platinum rings imaginary. Their bare fingers demonstrate their concord. Marriage, for them, is unconnected to outward show. It's as if paganism and Puritanism themselves made a spiritual pact.

The imagery extends the poem's reach beyond an individual woman to wider nature. Again we might think of Patrick Kavanagh and the "triangular hill" so lovingly feminised in the poem "Innocence". Thomas places the encounter with his real bride-to-be in his own personally cherished rural space, one of those luminous greenwoods no less integral to the Welsh landscape than are its stony hills.

Luminary

My luminary,
my morning and evening
star. My light at noon
when there is no sun
and the sky lowers. My balance
of joy in a world
that has gone off joy's
standard. Yours the face
that young I recognised
as though I had known you
of old. Come, my eyes
said, out into the morning
of a world whose dew
waits for your footprint.
Before a green altar
with the thrush for priest
I took those gossamer
vows that neither the Church
could stale nor the Machine
tarnish, that with the years
have grown hard as flint,
lighter than platinum
on our ringless fingers.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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