Richard Butchins's Blog: Angels stand corrected... - Posts Tagged "fantasy"

Another brief extract from Pavement... in a day or two I'll tell you about the time I met Neil Gaiman.


I’m standing on a flat deserted seashore.There are large cube-like blocks of black stone that appear to have been frozen in mid-tumble to the water’s edge. They’re heaped up and strewn around like children’s building blocks.The ocean is metallic grey, oily and flat, like the surface of an ice rink. I might have thought it was solid but I know it’s not, small waves lapping at the rocks along the edge show me this.

I am aware of things under the surface of the water, things terrifying and deadly.The shoreline disappears into the distance in either direction, a straight line, as far as I can see. It vanishes into the murky sky, a sky that is dark grey and boiling with clouds that burst with silent sheet lightning. The horizon is a mixture of blood red and a sickly green light filtered through the angry clouds.

There is complete silence, as if all noise has been removed from the universe. I am standing on a narrow pathway set back from the shore and made, I notice, from Portland stone slabs.The surface is new and the slabs perfectly set. This path has never been walked, of that I am sure. It leads off in both directions. I am alone. I turn to look behind me, inland there is nothing to be seen, just a wall of blackness. A dark so tangible you can grasp it in your hand like clay.

I have to go somewhere, so I walk, and as I walk the scenery stays the same. I can see tiny movements in my peripheral vision. In the tangible dark something is moving. I walk for hours and as I walk, the dark recedes to reveal a landscape of huge stone slabs and shards, piled up high into the sky, they look as if they should collapse at any moment. Giant paving slabs piled up to the sky by an autistic ogre.These piles of rocks pay only lip service to gravity. The pavement under my feet is warm and comfortable, a fantastic walking experience. I look at my feet and they are glowing and perfect, no shoes, in fact, I am naked

Pavement

The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm by Jacob Grimm

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Once upon a time there were two brothers named Grimm. They were thieves and they would visit the homes of poor people throughout the land and steal their stories and their tales. These evil brothers would make the stories their own rewriting and embellishing the tales in ways that were never meant to be and then they sold them and made themselves rich and famous. So rich and famous that many years later (102 to be precise) still other men of letters and merchants of words are cashing in on the tales of the poor villagers who are long since dead. But, I'm pleased to say no one lived happily ever after.”

It’s, of course, easy to forget that the Grimm brothers did in fact rape and pillage the folklore of the surrounding regions but not through traveling about as is commonly believed. They took them from already printed sources and as this book referrers to them (rather oddly) “informants” making the tales themselves feel like crimes.

Though, it has to be said that I’m glad they ‘collected' the tales or I wouldn’t be able to read the original version of – for example – Hansel and Gretel where it’s the mother that forces a wimpy father to abandon his children in the woods because they haven’t enough food – rather than a wicked stepmother – The Grimm’s have a lot to answer for in creating the evil step parent trope. The children burn the old woman (witch) to death in an oven and steal her gems returning home to find the mother dead they and the father live happily ever after as rich folk. It also gives pause for thought about the German fixation with burning people to death – what’s with that?

The book contains a fair few grim (pun intended) tales such as “How some children played at slaughtering” which does what the title states except that the children after watching a pig being slaughtered then slaughter each other. It make Steven King read like Enid Blyton. I very much prefer these less sanitised and edited stories they are sparse and abrupt and so delightfully distant from Disney.




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