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The Centaur
On a cruise through the Greek islands, a man encounters a handsome father and his son. He is strangely drawn to his his fellow travellers, and discovers with some elation that they will all share a cabin aboard ship. Tricks of the light seem to join the pair into a single being when they walk ashore, and at times a third, much larger being appears to join them. Is the protagonist hallucinating, or is he experiencing repressed homosexual desires? Or is something darker and more ancient at work? Blackwood weaves a poetic, erotically charged tale against the exotic backdrop of the Greek islands.
Algernon Blackwood was an occult researcher, a practising magician and a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He used this extensive esoteric knowledge to produce novels and short stories that do far more than merely entertain, but are replete with hidden themes and allegories concerning the nature of the supra-mundane world and the array of psychological and spiritual states that humanity may attain. The Centaur is one of Blackwood's most profound works, at once a celebration, and a warning, of the power of nature and her spiritual minions. A compelling book, whose author was praised by H.P. Lovecraft for penning "some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age."
Algernon Blackwood was an occult researcher, a practising magician and a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He used this extensive esoteric knowledge to produce novels and short stories that do far more than merely entertain, but are replete with hidden themes and allegories concerning the nature of the supra-mundane world and the array of psychological and spiritual states that humanity may attain. The Centaur is one of Blackwood's most profound works, at once a celebration, and a warning, of the power of nature and her spiritual minions. A compelling book, whose author was praised by H.P. Lovecraft for penning "some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age."
294 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1911
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444 people want to read
About the author
Algernon Blackwood
1,260 books1,143 followersAlgernon Henry Blackwood (1869–1951) was an English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist and short story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of the genre. The literary critic S. T. Joshi stated, "His work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer's except Dunsany's" and that his short story collection Incredible Adventures (1914) "may be the premier weird collection of this or any other century".
Blackwood was born in Shooter's Hill (today part of south-east London, but then part of northwest Kent) and educated at Wellington College. His father was a Post Office administrator who, according to Peter Penzoldt, "though not devoid of genuine good-heartedness, had appallingly narrow religious ideas." Blackwood had a varied career, farming in Canada, operating a hotel, as a newspaper reporter in New York City, and, throughout his adult life, an occasional essayist for various periodicals. In his late thirties, he moved back to England and started to write stories of the supernatural. He was very successful, writing at least ten original collections of short stories and eventually appearing on both radio and television to tell them. He also wrote fourteen novels, several children's books, and a number of plays, most of which were produced but not published. He was an avid lover of nature and the outdoors, and many of his stories reflect this.
H.P. Lovecraft wrote of Blackwood: "He is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere." His powerful story "The Willows," which effectively describes another dimension impinging upon our own, was reckoned by Lovecraft to be not only "foremost of all" Blackwood's tales but the best "weird tale" of all time.
Among his thirty-odd books, Blackwood wrote a series of stories and short novels published as John Silence, Physician Extraordinary (1908), which featured a "psychic detective" who combined the skills of a Sherlock Holmes and a psychic medium. Blackwood also wrote light fantasy and juvenile books.
Blackwood was born in Shooter's Hill (today part of south-east London, but then part of northwest Kent) and educated at Wellington College. His father was a Post Office administrator who, according to Peter Penzoldt, "though not devoid of genuine good-heartedness, had appallingly narrow religious ideas." Blackwood had a varied career, farming in Canada, operating a hotel, as a newspaper reporter in New York City, and, throughout his adult life, an occasional essayist for various periodicals. In his late thirties, he moved back to England and started to write stories of the supernatural. He was very successful, writing at least ten original collections of short stories and eventually appearing on both radio and television to tell them. He also wrote fourteen novels, several children's books, and a number of plays, most of which were produced but not published. He was an avid lover of nature and the outdoors, and many of his stories reflect this.
H.P. Lovecraft wrote of Blackwood: "He is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere." His powerful story "The Willows," which effectively describes another dimension impinging upon our own, was reckoned by Lovecraft to be not only "foremost of all" Blackwood's tales but the best "weird tale" of all time.
Among his thirty-odd books, Blackwood wrote a series of stories and short novels published as John Silence, Physician Extraordinary (1908), which featured a "psychic detective" who combined the skills of a Sherlock Holmes and a psychic medium. Blackwood also wrote light fantasy and juvenile books.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews
April 13, 2012
Not a review (as I really can't be bothered about adding to the kipple that is already on the internet), but as no one else has written anything about this splendid novel and most have deemed to give it decidedly mediocre ratings I thought I better say something about it and it gives be a chance to complain about the so-called GoodReads readers - or idiots as I like to call them.
This is a unique and deeply beautiful didactic and poetic novel. Is it perfect? No - it's flawed and probably overwritten, but only if you are bothered about everything you read conforming to the dos and don'ts of that creative writers workshop you went on. This flies in the face of terse modern realist writing and thank fuck for that! No one's explained their low marks for this novel, so maybe I'm drawing the wrong conclusions, but baring in mind the colossal intolerance and ignorance of anything that isn't your typical plot-driven/character-driven shit by most of the moaning readers on here when they "don't get" such-and-such, you can't blame me for guessing that their insidious ignorance has tainted this to.
I can see why Blackwood is better respected for his shorts than his novels, but despite this I dearly loved this book. It's unique, therefore this is literature. It's not going to be for everyone. I'm guessing if you own a kindle then you're probably not going to like it - but if you prefer to travel by a slow barge than by a supersonic plane then you might like to give this a go. Don't be judgemental... don't worry if it occasionally meanders and for a few pages you're left with an slightly vague impressionistic idea of what you've just read... let it go... for there's some truly great writing to be found in here for those few who don't want a one size fits all approach to their literature.
This is a unique and deeply beautiful didactic and poetic novel. Is it perfect? No - it's flawed and probably overwritten, but only if you are bothered about everything you read conforming to the dos and don'ts of that creative writers workshop you went on. This flies in the face of terse modern realist writing and thank fuck for that! No one's explained their low marks for this novel, so maybe I'm drawing the wrong conclusions, but baring in mind the colossal intolerance and ignorance of anything that isn't your typical plot-driven/character-driven shit by most of the moaning readers on here when they "don't get" such-and-such, you can't blame me for guessing that their insidious ignorance has tainted this to.
I can see why Blackwood is better respected for his shorts than his novels, but despite this I dearly loved this book. It's unique, therefore this is literature. It's not going to be for everyone. I'm guessing if you own a kindle then you're probably not going to like it - but if you prefer to travel by a slow barge than by a supersonic plane then you might like to give this a go. Don't be judgemental... don't worry if it occasionally meanders and for a few pages you're left with an slightly vague impressionistic idea of what you've just read... let it go... for there's some truly great writing to be found in here for those few who don't want a one size fits all approach to their literature.
July 14, 2013
I wonder how many Herman Hesse readers realize how closely his stories of spiritual enlightenment parallel a tale of Lovecraftian horror:
I've mentioned before in my reviews of Hesse's work that his picture of 'enlightenment' often seems to have symptoms identical to a progressing mental disorder, whether it's the paranoid schizophrenia of a homeless transient in A Journey to the East or the 'secular saint' who wanders about mumbling, smiling vacantly, and making incoherent remarks like any dementia patient in The Glass Bead Game .
These are precisely the same themes, and the same structure that Blackwood uses in his lengthy and ponderous exploration of 'spiritualism'. To anyone familiar with the European movement, where Eastern religions were taken up and retranslated in quite strange ways to make them fit Western philosophical structures, it will be fairly clear what Blackwood is getting at. Indeed, there is a philosophical German-ness to the whole affair that can become positively maddening.
Blackwood keeps returning to the same concepts over and over, trying to lay them out in far-flung, poetic language, reaching out to the reader's heart instead of the mind--which is why it took me months to finish this book. But Blackwood is well-known as a prominent author of tales of psychological terror, which gives his approach to the spiritual a lot more punch than that of Hesse, Jung, or Blavatsky.
Indeed, this tale has roughly the same structure as Blackwood's most famous work: The Willows , where the characters are trapped alongside a world they cannot comprehend, which threatens to take over their lives, and their very souls. Yet somehow, we are meant to believe that the same incomprehensible cosmic influence that we feared in The Willows, we are meant to admire in The Centaur.
Of course, there is a certain realism there: a great enlightenment, be it light or dark, should be frightening and unsettling. If it isn't, then it wasn't really enlightenment. Part of Hesse's problem is that his view of enlightenment is always so milquetoast that it can hardly seem profound or powerful. Of course such a total change in perspective would be alienating and disturbing, and Blackwood gets that aspect down to a T.
Likewise, the most fascinating aspect of the tale--and the part which kept me reading even when the prose was dragging on interminably--was his representation of a friendship between two sorts of man: the skeptic and the dreamer, which I have rarely seen framed with more sympathy and realism. What struck me most was the way both characters often seemed to be searching for precisely the same thing, but expressing it in such different words, and from such different points of view that they didn't realize that they were actually in perfect agreement, much of the time.
Unfortunately, this balanced portrayal broke down as we came to the conclusion, when it became clearer and clearer that we were supposed to side with the 'enlightened dreamer'--of course, I never did. Just as with Hesse's character, Tegularius, I found the curious skeptic much more interesting than the wild-eyed prophet.
Again, it came down to the fact that, in supernatural horror, the outside force is always dominating us--we cannot explain it, we cannot really understand it, but the merest glimpse of it makes us obsessed, makes us go mad. Often, it is a madness of misery and depression--in this case, it is a madness of self-assurance and hubris--but is that really better?
How do we separate the man who has glimpsed the beyond and gone insane from the man who has glimpsed the beyond and come away with Truth? It is a central question in this story, and the character's attempt to deliver his experience to others is doomed from the start, because a revelation cannot be transferred.
It is the question of every faith, of every self-serving philosophy: what makes it any better than what every other person is doing? What makes it fundamentally different from a delusion, or a disorder? If no difference can be shown, then no difference exists.
Though Blackwood delves deep into convoluted, grandiose phrases, he still isn't able to deliver to us the wonder his character feels. One does sometimes get that sense of the sublime produced by good art: where experiencing it is truly transformative, but Blackwood's repetitive labor never quite captures a fresh view of the world--it is mainly the same old spiritualism: nature is good, civilization is harmful, we must simplify and leave our bodies behind, embracing only the intangible. I tend to find that any 'answer' that seeks mainly to deny our humanity falls rather flat.
It just becomes another breed of nihilism: a statement that what we are is insignificant, that our wants and desires, our joys and pains, are to be ignored and fought against, and we should instead live for oblivion, or the dream of oblivion--or even stranger, a dream of this life, but set in oblivion.
Blackwood gives us another supernatural horror tale of the man who sees too much, and whose humanity is consumed by it. Yet this man wants to be consumed: he wants to be alienated, to be mad, to die, and wants others to join him. There is something much more terrifying in this portrayal than in all the sorry fellows who fight to the last before succumbing. Here is a fresh perspective, rarely explored: the cultist who throws himself into Cthulhu's jaws in a fit of ecstasy, his mind blasted beyond all reason, beyond anything but the overwhelming cosmic force that has seized him and made him inhuman--where the question of 'more than human, or less than?' seems to be little more than a quibble over semantics.
"A sensitive man of spiritual temperament is wandering the world, unsure of his place in it. Eventually he encounters some strange experience that forever changes his perspective on the world, so that no matter how he tries, he cannot return to his old life. Instead, he becomes obsessed with this 'other world' of which he's caught a glimpse, abandoning his other life and alienating those around him. At last he finally reaches his goal, and passes from the world as his former friends remark what a pity it was that he wasted his potential in favor of his odd interests."
I've mentioned before in my reviews of Hesse's work that his picture of 'enlightenment' often seems to have symptoms identical to a progressing mental disorder, whether it's the paranoid schizophrenia of a homeless transient in A Journey to the East or the 'secular saint' who wanders about mumbling, smiling vacantly, and making incoherent remarks like any dementia patient in The Glass Bead Game .
These are precisely the same themes, and the same structure that Blackwood uses in his lengthy and ponderous exploration of 'spiritualism'. To anyone familiar with the European movement, where Eastern religions were taken up and retranslated in quite strange ways to make them fit Western philosophical structures, it will be fairly clear what Blackwood is getting at. Indeed, there is a philosophical German-ness to the whole affair that can become positively maddening.
Blackwood keeps returning to the same concepts over and over, trying to lay them out in far-flung, poetic language, reaching out to the reader's heart instead of the mind--which is why it took me months to finish this book. But Blackwood is well-known as a prominent author of tales of psychological terror, which gives his approach to the spiritual a lot more punch than that of Hesse, Jung, or Blavatsky.
Indeed, this tale has roughly the same structure as Blackwood's most famous work: The Willows , where the characters are trapped alongside a world they cannot comprehend, which threatens to take over their lives, and their very souls. Yet somehow, we are meant to believe that the same incomprehensible cosmic influence that we feared in The Willows, we are meant to admire in The Centaur.
Of course, there is a certain realism there: a great enlightenment, be it light or dark, should be frightening and unsettling. If it isn't, then it wasn't really enlightenment. Part of Hesse's problem is that his view of enlightenment is always so milquetoast that it can hardly seem profound or powerful. Of course such a total change in perspective would be alienating and disturbing, and Blackwood gets that aspect down to a T.
Likewise, the most fascinating aspect of the tale--and the part which kept me reading even when the prose was dragging on interminably--was his representation of a friendship between two sorts of man: the skeptic and the dreamer, which I have rarely seen framed with more sympathy and realism. What struck me most was the way both characters often seemed to be searching for precisely the same thing, but expressing it in such different words, and from such different points of view that they didn't realize that they were actually in perfect agreement, much of the time.
Unfortunately, this balanced portrayal broke down as we came to the conclusion, when it became clearer and clearer that we were supposed to side with the 'enlightened dreamer'--of course, I never did. Just as with Hesse's character, Tegularius, I found the curious skeptic much more interesting than the wild-eyed prophet.
Again, it came down to the fact that, in supernatural horror, the outside force is always dominating us--we cannot explain it, we cannot really understand it, but the merest glimpse of it makes us obsessed, makes us go mad. Often, it is a madness of misery and depression--in this case, it is a madness of self-assurance and hubris--but is that really better?
How do we separate the man who has glimpsed the beyond and gone insane from the man who has glimpsed the beyond and come away with Truth? It is a central question in this story, and the character's attempt to deliver his experience to others is doomed from the start, because a revelation cannot be transferred.
It is the question of every faith, of every self-serving philosophy: what makes it any better than what every other person is doing? What makes it fundamentally different from a delusion, or a disorder? If no difference can be shown, then no difference exists.
Though Blackwood delves deep into convoluted, grandiose phrases, he still isn't able to deliver to us the wonder his character feels. One does sometimes get that sense of the sublime produced by good art: where experiencing it is truly transformative, but Blackwood's repetitive labor never quite captures a fresh view of the world--it is mainly the same old spiritualism: nature is good, civilization is harmful, we must simplify and leave our bodies behind, embracing only the intangible. I tend to find that any 'answer' that seeks mainly to deny our humanity falls rather flat.
It just becomes another breed of nihilism: a statement that what we are is insignificant, that our wants and desires, our joys and pains, are to be ignored and fought against, and we should instead live for oblivion, or the dream of oblivion--or even stranger, a dream of this life, but set in oblivion.
Blackwood gives us another supernatural horror tale of the man who sees too much, and whose humanity is consumed by it. Yet this man wants to be consumed: he wants to be alienated, to be mad, to die, and wants others to join him. There is something much more terrifying in this portrayal than in all the sorry fellows who fight to the last before succumbing. Here is a fresh perspective, rarely explored: the cultist who throws himself into Cthulhu's jaws in a fit of ecstasy, his mind blasted beyond all reason, beyond anything but the overwhelming cosmic force that has seized him and made him inhuman--where the question of 'more than human, or less than?' seems to be little more than a quibble over semantics.
September 12, 2020
I have trouble describing exactly how I feel about this book. In a way, the main drive of the story was pretty relatable. Someone who is fed up with the mundaneness of the modern world seeking something more comfortable and interesting in nature, a cynical skeptic who wants something more out of life. Rich with psychology, spiritualism and dream-like prose that feels hallucinatory to read.
I can understand why many people might not like it. It’s wordy to the point of it being hard to remember or interpret what you’ve just read. I didn’t like it at first either, but it grew on me as it went along. It truly feels like living out a slow and vivid dream, one that’s worth taking your time to soak in every little beautiful detail.
I can understand why many people might not like it. It’s wordy to the point of it being hard to remember or interpret what you’ve just read. I didn’t like it at first either, but it grew on me as it went along. It truly feels like living out a slow and vivid dream, one that’s worth taking your time to soak in every little beautiful detail.
July 9, 2019
Overall, this was a wasted opportunity for Blackwood.
"The Centaur" was supposedly written after a brief writer's slump during which time Blackwood did a lot of traveling in the Caucasus. Later, his slump lifted, and he produced this story inspired by his feelings of awe and wonder at the sheer wild beauty of that mountainous Central Asian region. But after reading the contents of this work, it almost seems that what may have lifted his writer's block was some serious drugs.
The book's length is not due to any attention to characterization or plot. There is none of the former and little of the latter. An Irish foreign correspondent, O'Malley, is on a trip to the Caucasus where he meets a big bearded Russian guy and his son on the steamer boat. He becomes infatuated with the mysterious Slav for some reason, and it is revealed that O'Malley has some latent psychic tendencies and that the Russians are not as human as they seem. I can think of several ways this basic plot could have made for an interesting story, but instead, Blackwood dissolves the ideas in distasteful doses of dissertation and dreams. Unlike more masterful philosophical novels like Dostoevsky's "The Idiot," the ideas of the author are not delivered subtlety within the complexities of character actions but by repeated and boring sermons and preaching. And instead of symbolism and metaphor, we get overused double entendres like constantly referring to the Russian as "big" to mean not only his obvious physical stature, but also the greater metaphysical morphology hidden by his human guise. And "big" may also be a not so clever sexual reference, as the book is full of homoerotic overtones between the Russian and O'Malley that lack any eroticism because there is no meaningful relationship built up between the two.
And that is the biggest flaw of the novel--there is no emotional impact because there is no character development. The Russian just wanders around aimlessly and says maybe two lines of broken English in the whole book. So what is supposed to be so fascinating to the Reader about him that would drive someone to care to read over 200 pages of O'Malley chasing him across the Near East? And for that matter, who is O'Malley? What makes him special? What's his motivation or back story? What made him come to believe the things about a living Earth? What are his supposed psychic sensitivities? You don't know. And there are few hints because he has no personality. He is as wooden as the ship where half the book takes place. For a book that hinges around his relationships with the Earth and with this Russian mystery man, there needs to be a personality with which to have a relationship.
Despite the beautiful and lyrical quality of his prose, Blackwood delivered a very boring, self-indulgent, and pretentious piece of weird fiction that was very personal to him and impersonal to the reader. It is far beneath almost any of his superb short stories.
"The Centaur" was supposedly written after a brief writer's slump during which time Blackwood did a lot of traveling in the Caucasus. Later, his slump lifted, and he produced this story inspired by his feelings of awe and wonder at the sheer wild beauty of that mountainous Central Asian region. But after reading the contents of this work, it almost seems that what may have lifted his writer's block was some serious drugs.
The book's length is not due to any attention to characterization or plot. There is none of the former and little of the latter. An Irish foreign correspondent, O'Malley, is on a trip to the Caucasus where he meets a big bearded Russian guy and his son on the steamer boat. He becomes infatuated with the mysterious Slav for some reason, and it is revealed that O'Malley has some latent psychic tendencies and that the Russians are not as human as they seem. I can think of several ways this basic plot could have made for an interesting story, but instead, Blackwood dissolves the ideas in distasteful doses of dissertation and dreams. Unlike more masterful philosophical novels like Dostoevsky's "The Idiot," the ideas of the author are not delivered subtlety within the complexities of character actions but by repeated and boring sermons and preaching. And instead of symbolism and metaphor, we get overused double entendres like constantly referring to the Russian as "big" to mean not only his obvious physical stature, but also the greater metaphysical morphology hidden by his human guise. And "big" may also be a not so clever sexual reference, as the book is full of homoerotic overtones between the Russian and O'Malley that lack any eroticism because there is no meaningful relationship built up between the two.
And that is the biggest flaw of the novel--there is no emotional impact because there is no character development. The Russian just wanders around aimlessly and says maybe two lines of broken English in the whole book. So what is supposed to be so fascinating to the Reader about him that would drive someone to care to read over 200 pages of O'Malley chasing him across the Near East? And for that matter, who is O'Malley? What makes him special? What's his motivation or back story? What made him come to believe the things about a living Earth? What are his supposed psychic sensitivities? You don't know. And there are few hints because he has no personality. He is as wooden as the ship where half the book takes place. For a book that hinges around his relationships with the Earth and with this Russian mystery man, there needs to be a personality with which to have a relationship.
Despite the beautiful and lyrical quality of his prose, Blackwood delivered a very boring, self-indulgent, and pretentious piece of weird fiction that was very personal to him and impersonal to the reader. It is far beneath almost any of his superb short stories.
January 1, 2013
A really good story that's hard to put a finger on or even define. At times I felt the prose was far too long and overly descriptive. I understand why Blackwood did that- he's attempting to describe the indescribable.
Personally I am very surprised that this book never became something big. In fact as I was reading it, I could totally picture it as one of those abstract movies Brad Pitt might make. But I feel that although it might make for a beautiful movie, as some of that esoteric imagery might, well, be best illustrated as visual imagery and not only words, I still feel the depth of this story would be lost on the general public. Sad as that may be, I think the majority of the public would see what this book seems to be at the surface level: a somewhat homoerotic fascination of one man for another man (perhaps why this book was never famous back in its day? SHAME!). And although it is that at one level, it is so much deeper than that as well. It's not even only about Pagan Gods... it's even deeper then that! It's about the merging of forces, seen and unseen, and ultimately about that elusive, yet deeply desired by all, Enlightenment.
Personally I am very surprised that this book never became something big. In fact as I was reading it, I could totally picture it as one of those abstract movies Brad Pitt might make. But I feel that although it might make for a beautiful movie, as some of that esoteric imagery might, well, be best illustrated as visual imagery and not only words, I still feel the depth of this story would be lost on the general public. Sad as that may be, I think the majority of the public would see what this book seems to be at the surface level: a somewhat homoerotic fascination of one man for another man (perhaps why this book was never famous back in its day? SHAME!). And although it is that at one level, it is so much deeper than that as well. It's not even only about Pagan Gods... it's even deeper then that! It's about the merging of forces, seen and unseen, and ultimately about that elusive, yet deeply desired by all, Enlightenment.
June 29, 2014
amazing writing. Would you answer the call of the pan pipes, if you heard them ?
April 14, 2024
Earth is alive. Nature good. Civilization bad.
Now you don't have to read this.
Now you don't have to read this.
June 13, 2019
This work seems to be an attempt by Blackwood to lay out explicitly the philosophical underpinnings of his work as a whole. The result is a defense of mysticism that is out right horrible to read. To call it repetitious is an understatement. It is also facile in the extreme. I would have thought Blackwood more of a deep thinker than this book revealed him to be. At the time he wrote this logical positivism and scientism were rampant in society. This is a poor response to it, if that was the intention.
June 15, 2025
This is, without question, immediately one of my favourite novels of all time.
It has been an astonishing experience to read this mystical story about a man on a ship (with so many more multitudes) and his philosophically expanding relationship with Nature. It is a lovely synchronicity that I finished it at 1 a.m. on June 15th, with this date mentioned in the book.
This story has EVERYTHING I BELIEVE IN cosmologically. Blackwood sits within a shifting paradigm that feels incredibly relevant to today's environmental ethics and spirituality. It's eco-gothic, ecological thinking, relationality, Gaia, systems thinking ... it's all. The Universe feels further cracked open for me. I feel like I have encountered myself and simultaneously lost myself. Where do I go to read after THIS?
The characters, including the narrator in The Centaur, exhibit deep entanglements within the unlikeliest of eventual soul friends; they are seemingly archetypal, sometimes paradoxical and sometimes almost wholly aligned in movements of understanding each other. All characters seem to represent aspects of Blackwood (I'm reading his biography), such that it’s like having parts of him on the page, and all of him in your head. Blackwood is within and without these pages.
I see some interconnections with Yeats and 'A Vision', written later in 1925. Thie Centaur seems like it is Blackwood’s vision. Yeats and Blackwood were both in The Golden Dawn, sharing an interest in the arcane, esoteric and occult through practices and secret knowledge, through mechanisms only for the chosen and initiated.
Yeats stayed with the external, duality, and more mechanistic approaches, by documenting his complex systems (eg phases of the moon), straining for order in the chaos, explaining, yet remaining impenetrable except for the deeply initiated.
Blackwood, however, seems to have walked relationally off into the woods -- into the complex system, all life on Earth itself, and created a fictional story about it to explore these depths. The Centaur seems like the inner work of how he/we relate to the universe, traverse death in this life and how we relate to the more-than-human world. It can still be hard to navigate such themes in fictional form, but I was hooked on every word. Yeats seems to stay with The Self, Blackwood dissolves Himself.
Blackwood, for me seems richer in his capacity to communicate his vision through the deep work shared in The Centaur, compared to Yeats, but there is beauty in their dance. In a small and slow way, Blackwood tries not to leave others behind just because *he* has seen a vision, an important theme that emerges in the story. Blackwood appeals to the unlikely, silly, simple fools of souls like me, reading his work in the future, without knowing why of all people, I have such big questions. Why do I ask? Why can’t I keep my thoughts small? With Yeats, you get the crescent — with Blackwood, it’s also the whole of the moon.
I have been changed and I am changing. The Centaur has everything a questing mind might yearn for. A deeply philosophical wander.
It has been an astonishing experience to read this mystical story about a man on a ship (with so many more multitudes) and his philosophically expanding relationship with Nature. It is a lovely synchronicity that I finished it at 1 a.m. on June 15th, with this date mentioned in the book.
This story has EVERYTHING I BELIEVE IN cosmologically. Blackwood sits within a shifting paradigm that feels incredibly relevant to today's environmental ethics and spirituality. It's eco-gothic, ecological thinking, relationality, Gaia, systems thinking ... it's all. The Universe feels further cracked open for me. I feel like I have encountered myself and simultaneously lost myself. Where do I go to read after THIS?
The characters, including the narrator in The Centaur, exhibit deep entanglements within the unlikeliest of eventual soul friends; they are seemingly archetypal, sometimes paradoxical and sometimes almost wholly aligned in movements of understanding each other. All characters seem to represent aspects of Blackwood (I'm reading his biography), such that it’s like having parts of him on the page, and all of him in your head. Blackwood is within and without these pages.
I see some interconnections with Yeats and 'A Vision', written later in 1925. Thie Centaur seems like it is Blackwood’s vision. Yeats and Blackwood were both in The Golden Dawn, sharing an interest in the arcane, esoteric and occult through practices and secret knowledge, through mechanisms only for the chosen and initiated.
Yeats stayed with the external, duality, and more mechanistic approaches, by documenting his complex systems (eg phases of the moon), straining for order in the chaos, explaining, yet remaining impenetrable except for the deeply initiated.
Blackwood, however, seems to have walked relationally off into the woods -- into the complex system, all life on Earth itself, and created a fictional story about it to explore these depths. The Centaur seems like the inner work of how he/we relate to the universe, traverse death in this life and how we relate to the more-than-human world. It can still be hard to navigate such themes in fictional form, but I was hooked on every word. Yeats seems to stay with The Self, Blackwood dissolves Himself.
Blackwood, for me seems richer in his capacity to communicate his vision through the deep work shared in The Centaur, compared to Yeats, but there is beauty in their dance. In a small and slow way, Blackwood tries not to leave others behind just because *he* has seen a vision, an important theme that emerges in the story. Blackwood appeals to the unlikely, silly, simple fools of souls like me, reading his work in the future, without knowing why of all people, I have such big questions. Why do I ask? Why can’t I keep my thoughts small? With Yeats, you get the crescent — with Blackwood, it’s also the whole of the moon.
I have been changed and I am changing. The Centaur has everything a questing mind might yearn for. A deeply philosophical wander.
September 13, 2022
English author Algernon Blackwood was always one to make good use of his wide-ranging travels in the 14 novels and over 180 short stories and novellas that he would ultimately give to the world. For example, his early 1890s sojourn in Canada, where he worked as a dairy farmer and hotel operator, would, upon his return to England, provide the inspirational setting for one of his greatest novellas, "The Wendigo" (1910). Canoeing trips down the Danube during the summers of 1900 and 1901 would compel him to pen one of his most famous tales, "The Willows," in 1907. After Blackwood settled in Switzerland after 1908, the beautiful Alpine scenery there became the backdrop for many of the stories in his remarkable collection "Pan's Garden" (1912), and a visit to Egypt in 1912 likewise moved him to create not only two of his key stories, "Sand" (1912) and "A Descent Into Egypt" (1914), but also his 1916 novel "The Wave." And then there was Blackwood's trip to the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia, in the summer of 1910, which affected the author so much, apparently, that it spurred him to write the novel that he would later call his personal favorite of all his many creations; namely, "The Centaur."
"The Centaur" was released the year after that Caucasus journey, in 1911, as a hardcover volume by the British publisher Macmillan & Co. It was Blackwood's fourth novel, released when he was already 42. Almost a dozen editions have been released since, the two most recent being a 2016 volume from Stark House Press (a particularly nice deal, as this edition also includes Blackwood's third novel, 1910's "The Human Chord," which I just loved, in the same volume) and a 2022 release from Wildside Press. The edition that I was fortunate enough to acquire is the vintage Macmillan hardcover, but not a first edition, or even the second from 1912, but only the third from 1916; a nice solid copy regardless, and featuring some beautiful interior artwork by Walford Graham Robertson. And, to my great delight, the book has turned out to be an absolute masterwork from an author who never seems to let me down. A stunning amalgamation of travelogue, mysticism and cosmic awe, "The Centaur" may even prove a life-altering experience for those susceptible enough to its compelling claims, and indeed, you might never look at the natural world--and the cosmos--the same way again after experiencing it.
"The Centaur," essentially, is the story of an Irishman named Terence O'Malley, told to us by his close friend, a nameless narrator who we'd like to think is Blackwood himself, but who is patently not. (Blackwood, besides those two occupations mentioned up top, was also a gold prospector, a bartender, a journalist, a secretary, a model, an Intelligence officer...but never, as far as I know, a worker in an insurance office in London--although he did work in an insurance office, for three months, in Canada--as our narrator is here.) When we first encounter the 30-year-old O'Malley, he is feeling more lonely and out of place than ever, after a lifetime of sensing that modern-day civilization is just not for him. A man of decidedly mystical bent, the Irishman only feels at ease when he is walking in the woods or mountains, and ceaselessly attempts to draw himself closer to the Earth, which he deems a living, conscious entity; as our narrator tells us, O'Malley felt that "objects, landscapes, humans, and the rest, were verily aspects of the collective consciousness of the Earth, moods of her spirit, phases of her being, expressions of her deep, pure, passionate 'heart'--projections of herself." In pursuance of a wish to get even closer to Nature ("nature" is always spelled with a capital "N" in Blackwood), he boards a ship at Marseille and begins a cruise that will take him through Greece, the Black Sea and, ultimately, to the Caucasus. And once aboard that ship he encounters two very unusual personages: a large man (who seemingly appears even larger when looked at obliquely) who everyone deems to be Russian, and a boy who the passengers assume to be his son. This pair, neither of whom speaks barely a word of English, has a profound effect on O'Malley, who sees visions in their presence and feels a tremendous affinity with them. The kindly but mysteriously motivated ship's doctor, Heinrich Stahl, cautions the Irishman regarding this pair, calling them Cosmic Beings and survivors of the Urwelt (primeval world). "He is not a human being at all," the German doctor says of the Russian. He is "a little bit, a fragment, of the Soul of the World, and in that sense a survival--a survival of her youth." But as the transit progresses, O'Malley becomes more and more drawn to the strange pair, and his visions continue apace, especially as the ship enters the waters of ancient Greece. The Irishman can almost see the legendary gods in the sky.
Once docked at the Black Sea port of Batumi, in Georgia, O'Malley becomes separated from the Russian (significantly, we never learn his name, or that of the boy...if indeed they ever had any!), and sets off to commune in the lonely mountainous region accompanied only by a local guide. But after a month of wandering, the Irishman indeed finds his Russian friend, and the two set off together, to delve into the "Cosmic Consciousness of the Earth Mother." And, in an extended, lyrical and borderline hallucinogenic sequence, they do, seemingly transforming into semihuman, hooved creatures in the process. (What manner of equine creature they become is only revealed by the book's title.) O'Malley spends what seems to be many weeks in this sublime state, in contact with the Earth Mother, and vaguely sensing other figures who may just be the ancient gods of myth, and who are in an even deeper level of communing than himself. But all wonderful things must come to an end, and O'Malley thus finds, when he returns to his old self, that many surprises and disappointments are lying in wait when he arrives back in civilization....
During the course of "The Centaur," our narrator mentions that O'Malley’s notebooks could in no way express the grandeur of his verbal testimony, and admits that his own book regarding the Irishman's experiences cannot do them justice either. Similarly, my own description above of the story's bare outlines cannot convey to you the magical feeling of transport that Blackwood manages to achieve in his book. "The Centaur" was clearly a labor of love for the author; a novel in which he got to set forth his belief in the sentience of Nature so passionately that the reader cannot help being moved...and convinced. To bolster his credo here, Blackwood quotes liberally from any number of sources that he had read, most particularly the German philosopher/mystic Novalis, the German philosopher/psychologist Gustav Fechner, and the American philosopher/psychologist William James. This is largely a book of very profound ideas and is filled with any number of intelligent and fascinating discussions, particularly between O'Malley and the strangely sympathetic Dr. Stahl aboard the steamship, and between O'Malley and our narrator back home in London. And yet, Blackwood still manages to give his readers three scenes that should provide the requisite chills and wonder. In one, O'Malley spies upon the big Russian and his "son" aboard the ship at night, as something vague and large emerges from the sea to commune with them! In another, the boy seems to commit suicide by jumping overboard; O'Malley sees his spirit (?) hurl itself into the sea, and finds the boy's lifeless body at his feet. And that third wonderful sequence, of course, must be O'Malley’s transformed experience, as he canters over the mountainsides with a troop of other hooved beings and is brought close to the consciousness of the living Earth.
"The Centaur" is a book best read slowly, I feel, so as to better appreciate the many ideas that Blackwood lays out (although our narrator tells us that he "could not pretend more than a vague sympathetic understanding with such descriptions of a mystical experience," this reader, perhaps wrongly, felt he had a little more comprehension), as well as to savor the endlessly gorgeous language that he employs here. Make no mistake: This is a remarkably beautifully written book, with one stunning passage after another over the course of its entire 347-page length. Thus, this throwaway line about the weather in Marseille: "The mistral made the land unbearable, but herds of white horses ran galloping over the bay beneath a sky of childhood's blue." And this description of Greece by night:
"...And so, at last, the darkness came, a starry darkness of soft blue shadows and phosphorescent sea out of which the hills of the Cyclades rose faint as pictures of floating smoke a wind might waft away like flowers to the sky. The plains of Marathon lay far astern, blushing faintly with their scarlet tamarisk blossoms. The strange purple glow of sunset over Hymettus had long since faded. A hush grew over the sea, now a marvellous cobalt blue. The earth, gently sleeping, manifested dreamily. Into the subconscious state passed one half of her huge, gentle life...."
The entire book is like that, boasting exquisite language and creating a hypnotic and sustained mood over its entire duration. And very few authors, of course, were better than Blackwood at sustaining a mood of cosmic awe and atmospheric wonder. This is a book whose very special aura may linger with you for days after you turn its final page.
And, oh, as to that final page, it features an ending that in any other book would have to be deemed tragic, but is hardly so here. The only real tragedy to be found in O'Malley’s history, actually, is the difficulty he has of convincing others as to what he experienced, and the fact that enlisting others in his "back to Nature" cause seems to be a foredoomed impossibility. It would seem that all the folks O'Malley attempts to convince are more than happy to remain in the dirty, loud and overcrowded cities with which they are familiar. And this fact apparently dumbfounded Blackwood, who himself, in his 1923 autobiography "Episodes Before Thirty," called NYC "monstrous, non-human, almost unearthly...a scab on the skin of the planet."
For the rest of it, "The Centaur" also operates as a wonderful travelogue of sorts, and I guarantee that you'll feel compelled to take a Mediterranean cruise yourself after you've finished reading it, and then explore those wild highlands of the Caucasus. And really, when was the last time you read a book that was set in the Lipari Islands, the Cyclades, Trebizond and Batumi? Actually, I have not one quibble to raise against Blackwood's impeccable and flawless performance here. Yes, it's a bit odd that there's not a single female character of note to be found, but that's just the way the story worked out, I suppose. And sure, some readers might complain that the novel is too slow moving, too dry, too caught up with its arguments and too lacking in exciting action sequences. But not me. This is a very special novel, I feel, and I promise that you've never read anything quite like it...except, perhaps, in another Blackwood book! It is still another wonderfully controlled exhibition of craft by this great master of supernatural literature, and comes with my very highest recommendation. During the course of writing the novel, Blackwood apparently sent a letter to his friend saying "The theme, of course, is far beyond my powers, but it flames in me with such pain that I must get it out as best I can...." No worries, Mr. Blackwood...this reader says you did an extraordinary job, indeed!
(By the way, this review originally appeared on the FanLit website at https://fantasyliterature.com/ ... a most ideal destination for all fans of Algernon Blackwood!)
"The Centaur" was released the year after that Caucasus journey, in 1911, as a hardcover volume by the British publisher Macmillan & Co. It was Blackwood's fourth novel, released when he was already 42. Almost a dozen editions have been released since, the two most recent being a 2016 volume from Stark House Press (a particularly nice deal, as this edition also includes Blackwood's third novel, 1910's "The Human Chord," which I just loved, in the same volume) and a 2022 release from Wildside Press. The edition that I was fortunate enough to acquire is the vintage Macmillan hardcover, but not a first edition, or even the second from 1912, but only the third from 1916; a nice solid copy regardless, and featuring some beautiful interior artwork by Walford Graham Robertson. And, to my great delight, the book has turned out to be an absolute masterwork from an author who never seems to let me down. A stunning amalgamation of travelogue, mysticism and cosmic awe, "The Centaur" may even prove a life-altering experience for those susceptible enough to its compelling claims, and indeed, you might never look at the natural world--and the cosmos--the same way again after experiencing it.
"The Centaur," essentially, is the story of an Irishman named Terence O'Malley, told to us by his close friend, a nameless narrator who we'd like to think is Blackwood himself, but who is patently not. (Blackwood, besides those two occupations mentioned up top, was also a gold prospector, a bartender, a journalist, a secretary, a model, an Intelligence officer...but never, as far as I know, a worker in an insurance office in London--although he did work in an insurance office, for three months, in Canada--as our narrator is here.) When we first encounter the 30-year-old O'Malley, he is feeling more lonely and out of place than ever, after a lifetime of sensing that modern-day civilization is just not for him. A man of decidedly mystical bent, the Irishman only feels at ease when he is walking in the woods or mountains, and ceaselessly attempts to draw himself closer to the Earth, which he deems a living, conscious entity; as our narrator tells us, O'Malley felt that "objects, landscapes, humans, and the rest, were verily aspects of the collective consciousness of the Earth, moods of her spirit, phases of her being, expressions of her deep, pure, passionate 'heart'--projections of herself." In pursuance of a wish to get even closer to Nature ("nature" is always spelled with a capital "N" in Blackwood), he boards a ship at Marseille and begins a cruise that will take him through Greece, the Black Sea and, ultimately, to the Caucasus. And once aboard that ship he encounters two very unusual personages: a large man (who seemingly appears even larger when looked at obliquely) who everyone deems to be Russian, and a boy who the passengers assume to be his son. This pair, neither of whom speaks barely a word of English, has a profound effect on O'Malley, who sees visions in their presence and feels a tremendous affinity with them. The kindly but mysteriously motivated ship's doctor, Heinrich Stahl, cautions the Irishman regarding this pair, calling them Cosmic Beings and survivors of the Urwelt (primeval world). "He is not a human being at all," the German doctor says of the Russian. He is "a little bit, a fragment, of the Soul of the World, and in that sense a survival--a survival of her youth." But as the transit progresses, O'Malley becomes more and more drawn to the strange pair, and his visions continue apace, especially as the ship enters the waters of ancient Greece. The Irishman can almost see the legendary gods in the sky.
Once docked at the Black Sea port of Batumi, in Georgia, O'Malley becomes separated from the Russian (significantly, we never learn his name, or that of the boy...if indeed they ever had any!), and sets off to commune in the lonely mountainous region accompanied only by a local guide. But after a month of wandering, the Irishman indeed finds his Russian friend, and the two set off together, to delve into the "Cosmic Consciousness of the Earth Mother." And, in an extended, lyrical and borderline hallucinogenic sequence, they do, seemingly transforming into semihuman, hooved creatures in the process. (What manner of equine creature they become is only revealed by the book's title.) O'Malley spends what seems to be many weeks in this sublime state, in contact with the Earth Mother, and vaguely sensing other figures who may just be the ancient gods of myth, and who are in an even deeper level of communing than himself. But all wonderful things must come to an end, and O'Malley thus finds, when he returns to his old self, that many surprises and disappointments are lying in wait when he arrives back in civilization....
During the course of "The Centaur," our narrator mentions that O'Malley’s notebooks could in no way express the grandeur of his verbal testimony, and admits that his own book regarding the Irishman's experiences cannot do them justice either. Similarly, my own description above of the story's bare outlines cannot convey to you the magical feeling of transport that Blackwood manages to achieve in his book. "The Centaur" was clearly a labor of love for the author; a novel in which he got to set forth his belief in the sentience of Nature so passionately that the reader cannot help being moved...and convinced. To bolster his credo here, Blackwood quotes liberally from any number of sources that he had read, most particularly the German philosopher/mystic Novalis, the German philosopher/psychologist Gustav Fechner, and the American philosopher/psychologist William James. This is largely a book of very profound ideas and is filled with any number of intelligent and fascinating discussions, particularly between O'Malley and the strangely sympathetic Dr. Stahl aboard the steamship, and between O'Malley and our narrator back home in London. And yet, Blackwood still manages to give his readers three scenes that should provide the requisite chills and wonder. In one, O'Malley spies upon the big Russian and his "son" aboard the ship at night, as something vague and large emerges from the sea to commune with them! In another, the boy seems to commit suicide by jumping overboard; O'Malley sees his spirit (?) hurl itself into the sea, and finds the boy's lifeless body at his feet. And that third wonderful sequence, of course, must be O'Malley’s transformed experience, as he canters over the mountainsides with a troop of other hooved beings and is brought close to the consciousness of the living Earth.
"The Centaur" is a book best read slowly, I feel, so as to better appreciate the many ideas that Blackwood lays out (although our narrator tells us that he "could not pretend more than a vague sympathetic understanding with such descriptions of a mystical experience," this reader, perhaps wrongly, felt he had a little more comprehension), as well as to savor the endlessly gorgeous language that he employs here. Make no mistake: This is a remarkably beautifully written book, with one stunning passage after another over the course of its entire 347-page length. Thus, this throwaway line about the weather in Marseille: "The mistral made the land unbearable, but herds of white horses ran galloping over the bay beneath a sky of childhood's blue." And this description of Greece by night:
"...And so, at last, the darkness came, a starry darkness of soft blue shadows and phosphorescent sea out of which the hills of the Cyclades rose faint as pictures of floating smoke a wind might waft away like flowers to the sky. The plains of Marathon lay far astern, blushing faintly with their scarlet tamarisk blossoms. The strange purple glow of sunset over Hymettus had long since faded. A hush grew over the sea, now a marvellous cobalt blue. The earth, gently sleeping, manifested dreamily. Into the subconscious state passed one half of her huge, gentle life...."
The entire book is like that, boasting exquisite language and creating a hypnotic and sustained mood over its entire duration. And very few authors, of course, were better than Blackwood at sustaining a mood of cosmic awe and atmospheric wonder. This is a book whose very special aura may linger with you for days after you turn its final page.
And, oh, as to that final page, it features an ending that in any other book would have to be deemed tragic, but is hardly so here. The only real tragedy to be found in O'Malley’s history, actually, is the difficulty he has of convincing others as to what he experienced, and the fact that enlisting others in his "back to Nature" cause seems to be a foredoomed impossibility. It would seem that all the folks O'Malley attempts to convince are more than happy to remain in the dirty, loud and overcrowded cities with which they are familiar. And this fact apparently dumbfounded Blackwood, who himself, in his 1923 autobiography "Episodes Before Thirty," called NYC "monstrous, non-human, almost unearthly...a scab on the skin of the planet."
For the rest of it, "The Centaur" also operates as a wonderful travelogue of sorts, and I guarantee that you'll feel compelled to take a Mediterranean cruise yourself after you've finished reading it, and then explore those wild highlands of the Caucasus. And really, when was the last time you read a book that was set in the Lipari Islands, the Cyclades, Trebizond and Batumi? Actually, I have not one quibble to raise against Blackwood's impeccable and flawless performance here. Yes, it's a bit odd that there's not a single female character of note to be found, but that's just the way the story worked out, I suppose. And sure, some readers might complain that the novel is too slow moving, too dry, too caught up with its arguments and too lacking in exciting action sequences. But not me. This is a very special novel, I feel, and I promise that you've never read anything quite like it...except, perhaps, in another Blackwood book! It is still another wonderfully controlled exhibition of craft by this great master of supernatural literature, and comes with my very highest recommendation. During the course of writing the novel, Blackwood apparently sent a letter to his friend saying "The theme, of course, is far beyond my powers, but it flames in me with such pain that I must get it out as best I can...." No worries, Mr. Blackwood...this reader says you did an extraordinary job, indeed!
(By the way, this review originally appeared on the FanLit website at https://fantasyliterature.com/ ... a most ideal destination for all fans of Algernon Blackwood!)
May 17, 2012
Not bad, although I could sort of see where it was going from quite early one. I don't really agree with the pagan-esque philosophy, but much of what is stated could really be ascribed to any image of the Divine. Plus, on the whole, just an interesting story, especially if you, like me, ever feel like you don't "fit in" to modern civilization.
January 16, 2024
There are definitely better Blackwood novels; don't take this one as an indicator.
Verbose, flowery, tedious repetition of a few paragraphs said in as many different ways as possible over hundreds of pages. The concept and idea is great; the tale gets old and rutted quickly.
Verbose, flowery, tedious repetition of a few paragraphs said in as many different ways as possible over hundreds of pages. The concept and idea is great; the tale gets old and rutted quickly.
April 17, 2018
This is a story about O'Malley, a man who is uncomfortable in the modern world and who, in the course of a vacation to get back in touch with Nature, encounters several individuals who argue both for and against the reality of his discomfort and the meaning behind it.
There are several gorgeous passages, some of which reminded me of Tolkien, as O'Malley begins his journey and we are introduced to the passengers who will be sharing his steamship journey to the Caucasus mountains. Given the book's title, there is little surprise that we will encounter a centaur at some point on the journey and yet the author drags this out, hinting at the smell of horses and the impression of bulk in such a way that it becomes frustrating. One isn't surprised to discover that "creature" in question is a centaur. Instead, one is curious about why it's a centaur. This is never addressed in the text, which reads more and more like a religious tract as the novel progresses.
O'Malley becomes increasingly fanatical about his personal experiences, continually degrades the idea of his fellow passengers' lives and experiences, and eventually considers whether a man's life is worth anything if he doesn't share O'Malley's supernatural experience of the natural world. I believe that I was supposed to empathize with O'Malley, but I could not. His journey begins to read like that of a cult leader although he never becomes aggressive in desire to save the world in any way save mentally. However, since the reader is privy to his attitudes of disgust and hate toward the people around him and his belief that his experiences render him incapable of harm (because he's in Nature...the good version of Nature, all Earth mother caring for her children without all that nasty sex), he feels threatening rather than threatened. Despite a few warnings against going "too far," the author never provides any external threat to O'Malley's person.
And, yes, the Earth is the only positive female character in this book, save one female centaur whose female silhouette is shown once, briefly. O'Malley has to be convinced that motherhood (and fatherhood) are even legitimate emotions by a vision. This brushes against something that the other characters mention: that O'Malley (and another character) are too "pure" for the world and are, in a sense, throwbacks to earlier inhabitants of the earth. He doesn't, in the end, feel human.
The story wavers uncertainly (for me) between horror and hope. O'Malley comes close to feeling monstrous rather than semi-divine and, since the entire story is centered around his becoming...something...the book left me cold. There were several places where the author seemed to be forestalling critical judgement, particularly in the insistent throughout that this wasn't a story that could be understood in any way through the intellect. So...why did I bother to read it in the first place? I could have just waited and consumed it as a vapor racing across the field when we all become centaurs (or whatever).
There are several gorgeous passages, some of which reminded me of Tolkien, as O'Malley begins his journey and we are introduced to the passengers who will be sharing his steamship journey to the Caucasus mountains. Given the book's title, there is little surprise that we will encounter a centaur at some point on the journey and yet the author drags this out, hinting at the smell of horses and the impression of bulk in such a way that it becomes frustrating. One isn't surprised to discover that "creature" in question is a centaur. Instead, one is curious about why it's a centaur. This is never addressed in the text, which reads more and more like a religious tract as the novel progresses.
O'Malley becomes increasingly fanatical about his personal experiences, continually degrades the idea of his fellow passengers' lives and experiences, and eventually considers whether a man's life is worth anything if he doesn't share O'Malley's supernatural experience of the natural world. I believe that I was supposed to empathize with O'Malley, but I could not. His journey begins to read like that of a cult leader although he never becomes aggressive in desire to save the world in any way save mentally. However, since the reader is privy to his attitudes of disgust and hate toward the people around him and his belief that his experiences render him incapable of harm (because he's in Nature...the good version of Nature, all Earth mother caring for her children without all that nasty sex), he feels threatening rather than threatened. Despite a few warnings against going "too far," the author never provides any external threat to O'Malley's person.
And, yes, the Earth is the only positive female character in this book, save one female centaur whose female silhouette is shown once, briefly. O'Malley has to be convinced that motherhood (and fatherhood) are even legitimate emotions by a vision. This brushes against something that the other characters mention: that O'Malley (and another character) are too "pure" for the world and are, in a sense, throwbacks to earlier inhabitants of the earth. He doesn't, in the end, feel human.
The story wavers uncertainly (for me) between horror and hope. O'Malley comes close to feeling monstrous rather than semi-divine and, since the entire story is centered around his becoming...something...the book left me cold. There were several places where the author seemed to be forestalling critical judgement, particularly in the insistent throughout that this wasn't a story that could be understood in any way through the intellect. So...why did I bother to read it in the first place? I could have just waited and consumed it as a vapor racing across the field when we all become centaurs (or whatever).
February 13, 2024
‘The Centaur’ is a truly remarkable departure for a writer who is generally regarded as the father of the school of shivery horror stories. Its slow pace might put off readers of the grotesque, but it merely lends force to the build-up here. It is not that the book has no supernatural horror: it has, but the horror is different from the usual bells-and-whistle kind. If anything, I would say that it is a horror of ourselves.
The premise Blackwood offers is this: Our sensory organs have gradually degenerated and decayed, so that we have neither the eyes and ears of a cat, nor the ability to identify something by its smell, like a wolf, or heat-sense prey, like a snake. Only touch and taste remain to us. And yet, somewhere in the past, we must have had all these capabilities in order to survive.
Although this might reasonably be explained as a natural evolutionary process, Algernon Blackwood denounces reason, since no amount of reason can explain the mystery of life. Along with our physical sensory capacities, we have lost something that we had when the first men walked the earth, what the first men had, but threw off as garbage in order to develop reason. That lost quality was ridiculed now, and those who had its vestigial remains were shunned or beaten or both.
It is at this point that Blackwood turns the exercise into one of intense spiritualism and pan animism. The wave of spiritualism which is unimaginable today was very powerful at the turn of the century. One reason for this was the influence of German and Russian romanticism, which found expression in England in the PreRaphaelite Movement, and in a kind of vague, flowery, touchy-feely mysticism. (That was knocked out for us by two world wars, which took us to the point of no return. Certain words in the language carry with them only a sense of scorn and ridicule: ‘honour,’ ‘glory,’ ‘bless,’ ‘kindness,’ ‘moral,’ ‘spiritual,’ ‘soul,’ or even ‘God,’ unless as an expletive.)
‘The Centaur' is an exploration of what this lost quality - beyond and above either the soul or consciousness - might be, just how weak or powerful it might be, and what might happen if the people who still retained the memory of it banded together against the rest of the world, not in aggression, but as a means of self-defence. If forty-six chapters seems too long, the utter poetry of Blackwood’s language is compensation indeed. The title derives from the original myth of centaurs as gentle, wise healers and musicians. They were particularly regarded for their ability to foretell the future from the stars. Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ first debases the Centaurs into monsters and beasts: that is why here their very otherness brings the crowds baying for the blood of those born with this – gift? instinct? soul?
The premise Blackwood offers is this: Our sensory organs have gradually degenerated and decayed, so that we have neither the eyes and ears of a cat, nor the ability to identify something by its smell, like a wolf, or heat-sense prey, like a snake. Only touch and taste remain to us. And yet, somewhere in the past, we must have had all these capabilities in order to survive.
Although this might reasonably be explained as a natural evolutionary process, Algernon Blackwood denounces reason, since no amount of reason can explain the mystery of life. Along with our physical sensory capacities, we have lost something that we had when the first men walked the earth, what the first men had, but threw off as garbage in order to develop reason. That lost quality was ridiculed now, and those who had its vestigial remains were shunned or beaten or both.
It is at this point that Blackwood turns the exercise into one of intense spiritualism and pan animism. The wave of spiritualism which is unimaginable today was very powerful at the turn of the century. One reason for this was the influence of German and Russian romanticism, which found expression in England in the PreRaphaelite Movement, and in a kind of vague, flowery, touchy-feely mysticism. (That was knocked out for us by two world wars, which took us to the point of no return. Certain words in the language carry with them only a sense of scorn and ridicule: ‘honour,’ ‘glory,’ ‘bless,’ ‘kindness,’ ‘moral,’ ‘spiritual,’ ‘soul,’ or even ‘God,’ unless as an expletive.)
‘The Centaur' is an exploration of what this lost quality - beyond and above either the soul or consciousness - might be, just how weak or powerful it might be, and what might happen if the people who still retained the memory of it banded together against the rest of the world, not in aggression, but as a means of self-defence. If forty-six chapters seems too long, the utter poetry of Blackwood’s language is compensation indeed. The title derives from the original myth of centaurs as gentle, wise healers and musicians. They were particularly regarded for their ability to foretell the future from the stars. Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ first debases the Centaurs into monsters and beasts: that is why here their very otherness brings the crowds baying for the blood of those born with this – gift? instinct? soul?
April 29, 2025
4.25⭐
This is the story of an Irishman who is a travel correspondent named Terence O’Malley, told to us by his close friend, a nameless narrator who works in a dull and boring insurance office. The story follows O'Malley, who embarks on a journey through the Caucasus Mountains, where he encounters a mysterious doctor, Dr. Heinrich Stahl whom he knew from his steamship voyages as the ship's doctor. They shared a mystical experience, which amounts to surrender of the ego to attain life after death on a different level of spiritual advancement in the original valley of creation in the Caucasus.
As they sail the ports to Batoum, O'Malley becomes increasingly aware of a profound connection to nature and the ancient, mythical forces that inhabit it. The narrative explores themes of transcendence, the intersection of the human and the divine, and the quest for a deeper understanding of existence beyond the confines of modern civilization. Terence O'Malley submits with sensitivity, while Dr. Stahl, who knows more, is held back by his intellectualizing.
The first portion of the novel takes place (as told in flashback) on a cruise vessel proceeding from Marseilles to the Caucasus. On the ship O'Malley becomes acquainted with a strange Russian, who is obviously not entirely human. The Russian, as Stahl explains, is possessed by a pre-modern mystical consciousness and is a primeval man, a fragment of the Soul of the World. O'Malley is invited to share the experience but holds back.
The later parts of the novel take place in the Caucasus, where Stahl with his little modern intellect is no longer there to hinder him, O'Malley sees the Russian again in a vision. There is a rushing of wind, one day, and the Russian appears as a centaur.
O'Malley's spirit joins him, and together they gallop in ecstasy to the lost valley. But O'Malley must return to life. He then learns that his experience had lasted only a moment or two, and that the Russian had already died. Returning to London, O'Malley tells his story to the narrator, then dies. He joins the giant elementals, the survivals of an earlier and happier state of consciousness on earth. He has heard the Pipes of Pan, the flute of the mythological Greek god who embodies a joyful free ranging pastoral life.
This is the story of an Irishman who is a travel correspondent named Terence O’Malley, told to us by his close friend, a nameless narrator who works in a dull and boring insurance office. The story follows O'Malley, who embarks on a journey through the Caucasus Mountains, where he encounters a mysterious doctor, Dr. Heinrich Stahl whom he knew from his steamship voyages as the ship's doctor. They shared a mystical experience, which amounts to surrender of the ego to attain life after death on a different level of spiritual advancement in the original valley of creation in the Caucasus.
As they sail the ports to Batoum, O'Malley becomes increasingly aware of a profound connection to nature and the ancient, mythical forces that inhabit it. The narrative explores themes of transcendence, the intersection of the human and the divine, and the quest for a deeper understanding of existence beyond the confines of modern civilization. Terence O'Malley submits with sensitivity, while Dr. Stahl, who knows more, is held back by his intellectualizing.
The first portion of the novel takes place (as told in flashback) on a cruise vessel proceeding from Marseilles to the Caucasus. On the ship O'Malley becomes acquainted with a strange Russian, who is obviously not entirely human. The Russian, as Stahl explains, is possessed by a pre-modern mystical consciousness and is a primeval man, a fragment of the Soul of the World. O'Malley is invited to share the experience but holds back.
The later parts of the novel take place in the Caucasus, where Stahl with his little modern intellect is no longer there to hinder him, O'Malley sees the Russian again in a vision. There is a rushing of wind, one day, and the Russian appears as a centaur.
O'Malley's spirit joins him, and together they gallop in ecstasy to the lost valley. But O'Malley must return to life. He then learns that his experience had lasted only a moment or two, and that the Russian had already died. Returning to London, O'Malley tells his story to the narrator, then dies. He joins the giant elementals, the survivals of an earlier and happier state of consciousness on earth. He has heard the Pipes of Pan, the flute of the mythological Greek god who embodies a joyful free ranging pastoral life.
June 1, 2020
Despite repeated protestations of language's illegitimacy in communicating cosmic truths, Blackwood here guides the reader on a hallucinogenic journey towards madness/divine revelation (pick a side). Through the elective psychopathy of protagonist O'Malley, a metaphysical veil is peeled back, chapter by chapter, until we return to nature in all its thundering glory. Revealing the 'Urwelt' within.
What makes this particular unique, and something more than the formulaic, poor man's Glass Bead Game as others have suggested, is the embodiment of the centaur figure as a manifestation of cosmic unity. While the word 'centaur' is rarely used throughout the text, the following passage describes the essence of O'Malley's transformation with incredible imaginative (and, dare I say it, cinematic) richness:
"For on the edge of the advancing sunlight first this Cosmic Being crouched, then rose with alert and springing movement, leaping to his feet in a single bound that propelled him with a stride of more than a man’s two limbs. His great sides quivered as he shook himself. A roar, similar to that sound the distance already swallowed, rolled forth into the air. With head thrown back, chest forward, too, for all the backward slant of the mighty shoulders, he stood there, grandly outlined, pushing the wind before him. The great brown eyes shone with the joy of freedom and escape—a superb and regal transformation."
I'll leave you with just one recommendation. Just as you shouldn't drink on an empty stomach, don't read this with an empty head. Intersperse your reading with walks through fields, meditation, good times with friends. To really understand this novel, you need to feel it. And to feel it, you need the words to truly resonate with your existing mental state.
On this point, again, I couldn't say it better than Blackwood himself:
."I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism.”
What makes this particular unique, and something more than the formulaic, poor man's Glass Bead Game as others have suggested, is the embodiment of the centaur figure as a manifestation of cosmic unity. While the word 'centaur' is rarely used throughout the text, the following passage describes the essence of O'Malley's transformation with incredible imaginative (and, dare I say it, cinematic) richness:
"For on the edge of the advancing sunlight first this Cosmic Being crouched, then rose with alert and springing movement, leaping to his feet in a single bound that propelled him with a stride of more than a man’s two limbs. His great sides quivered as he shook himself. A roar, similar to that sound the distance already swallowed, rolled forth into the air. With head thrown back, chest forward, too, for all the backward slant of the mighty shoulders, he stood there, grandly outlined, pushing the wind before him. The great brown eyes shone with the joy of freedom and escape—a superb and regal transformation."
I'll leave you with just one recommendation. Just as you shouldn't drink on an empty stomach, don't read this with an empty head. Intersperse your reading with walks through fields, meditation, good times with friends. To really understand this novel, you need to feel it. And to feel it, you need the words to truly resonate with your existing mental state.
On this point, again, I couldn't say it better than Blackwood himself:
."I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism.”
June 5, 2024
It took me a decade of interrupted efforts to read Algernon Blackwood’s The Centaur, and despite my earlier frustrations with the book’s slowness and repetition, I’m happy that I came back to it. I found that I could eventually read it when I gave up on the idea that The Centaur was a story, in any traditional sense. Instead, I embraced the idea that The Centaur is a work of philosophy, written by a man who desperately wanted to see the designs of benign, antique creatures and deities operating unseen; only felt in our most intimate, nature-derived moments of awe and wonder, but objectively real despite our inability to perceive them.
The book borrows heavily from August Fechner’s concept of the Living Earth.
I sincerely appreciate Blackwood’s sense of wonder and his fascination with a polytheistic worldview. The novel seems to be a justification of some deeply held beliefs, appealing to a pseudo-scientific philosophy. But that hardly makes it any less beautiful, in my opinion; for during the fin de siècle, many authors, artists, and thinkers appealed to irrationality – or more generously, Romanticism – as the advance of Positivism seemed to strip the world of its core mysteries.
However, it’s completely understandable that the plot – or lack thereof – would turn away readers of Blackwood’s more traditional ghost stories. The Centaur is long and even tedious. If you don’t necessarily see any merit in Blackwood’s thinking or sympathize with his longing for the world to be something more splendid and magic than we can perceive it to be, then it’s you likely won’t enjoy the book. It’s very thin on characters, save O’Malley and his dialectic counterpart, Dr. Stahl.
Reading The Centaur changed the way I interpret Blackwood’s other stories about nature and the supernatural (like 'The Man Whom the Trees Loved' or 'The Sea Fit'). They now seem (to me) emanations of the philosophy presented here.
The book borrows heavily from August Fechner’s concept of the Living Earth.
I sincerely appreciate Blackwood’s sense of wonder and his fascination with a polytheistic worldview. The novel seems to be a justification of some deeply held beliefs, appealing to a pseudo-scientific philosophy. But that hardly makes it any less beautiful, in my opinion; for during the fin de siècle, many authors, artists, and thinkers appealed to irrationality – or more generously, Romanticism – as the advance of Positivism seemed to strip the world of its core mysteries.
However, it’s completely understandable that the plot – or lack thereof – would turn away readers of Blackwood’s more traditional ghost stories. The Centaur is long and even tedious. If you don’t necessarily see any merit in Blackwood’s thinking or sympathize with his longing for the world to be something more splendid and magic than we can perceive it to be, then it’s you likely won’t enjoy the book. It’s very thin on characters, save O’Malley and his dialectic counterpart, Dr. Stahl.
Reading The Centaur changed the way I interpret Blackwood’s other stories about nature and the supernatural (like 'The Man Whom the Trees Loved' or 'The Sea Fit'). They now seem (to me) emanations of the philosophy presented here.
March 10, 2021
I think this is one of those books where you have to be in the right state of mind in order to find the experience fulfilling in any way. From the very beginning the reader is overwhelmed by the pure poetic beauty of Blackwood's writing, the effect of which is rather comparable to losing one's mind to the earth's Cosmic Consciousness. As fun as it can be to just let yourself be swept away by this sheer display of literary eloquence on Blackwood's part, it can get a little tedious towards the middle chapters, when the novel occasionally seems to forget that it is, indeed, a novel, and not a philosophical treatise on vaguely neo-pagan holistic cosmology. The fact that you can more or less see the basic outline of Blackwood's "plot", such as it is, coming from a mile away certainly doesn't help either, but by the end of the book (particularly in the very last chapter) the beauty Blackwood's writing again lulls you into a pseudo-hallucinogenic peace of mind which makes you forget about all the flaws of the previous chapters and leaves you with an overall more-than-averagely-favourable view of the book as a whole.
P.S. For any Lovecraft fans out there: this is the book where the opening quotation from "The Call of Cthulhu" comes from. Just thought I'd mention that as an interesting tidbit.
P.S. For any Lovecraft fans out there: this is the book where the opening quotation from "The Call of Cthulhu" comes from. Just thought I'd mention that as an interesting tidbit.
February 19, 2018
This story is narrated by someone to which the story was told by the main character. I knew I was really in for a tough read the first time there narrator said (at length) "You had to be there to understand."
O'Malley is a man who does not fit in with the world. He feels a yearning to some Utopian past that he has difficulty describing. This yearning takes him all over to world in search of his peace. He meets a man traveling with a young boy. Instantly upon seeing them, he feels a kinship and understanding he did not know existed. He explores these feelings and the implications of them at length and it great unnecessary detail.
This book deals with some lofty and interesting ideas. In trying to explain these ideas to people who cannot possibly understand- mere mortals that we are- it drones on and becomes boring. There is much potential in the story itself if only the author allowed the reader to feel for ourselves instead of trying to verbally beat us into the exact feelings he wants us to have.
O'Malley is a man who does not fit in with the world. He feels a yearning to some Utopian past that he has difficulty describing. This yearning takes him all over to world in search of his peace. He meets a man traveling with a young boy. Instantly upon seeing them, he feels a kinship and understanding he did not know existed. He explores these feelings and the implications of them at length and it great unnecessary detail.
This book deals with some lofty and interesting ideas. In trying to explain these ideas to people who cannot possibly understand- mere mortals that we are- it drones on and becomes boring. There is much potential in the story itself if only the author allowed the reader to feel for ourselves instead of trying to verbally beat us into the exact feelings he wants us to have.
May 28, 2017
Normally I love reading Algernon Blackwood, but this was one of those stories where it sounded painful to describe what I was reading to coworkers. They asked because of the constant frowns.
"But, did you even understand what the story was about?" Actually, yes, I did. I also know that Arthur Machen has also written books about mysticism, and I think he does it better. Does this mean that Blackwood can't write mysticism too? No, he definitely can. Blackwood is a genuinely good author, and I enjoy most of his work. I will admit, there were some really interesting ideas in The Centaur, but I think that the story was too long.
Will I still read a book at work even if it is bad? Yes.
And if you're wondering whether I read the whole story or not … Yes, I did. Afterwards I looked for more of Blackwood's work, because he does supernatural horror very well.
"But, did you even understand what the story was about?" Actually, yes, I did. I also know that Arthur Machen has also written books about mysticism, and I think he does it better. Does this mean that Blackwood can't write mysticism too? No, he definitely can. Blackwood is a genuinely good author, and I enjoy most of his work. I will admit, there were some really interesting ideas in The Centaur, but I think that the story was too long.
Will I still read a book at work even if it is bad? Yes.
And if you're wondering whether I read the whole story or not … Yes, I did. Afterwards I looked for more of Blackwood's work, because he does supernatural horror very well.
November 2, 2020
This a hugely important novel for anyone trying to understand Blackwood's approach and philosophy. As someone who has adored Blackwood's short stories and his weird novels like "Descent into Egypt" which is a truly astonishing read... this was a bit disappointing. Whilst he's obviously still learning his craft in this book, it's a little too repetitive and the pacing a little too timid. As for understanding his philosophy, it's hard to miss as he repeats his central idea over and over in the second half of the book until it becomes just a little tedious.
December 31, 2023
“We are much greater than we know, and there is a vast subconscious part of us. But, what is more important still, there is a super-consciousness as well.” As it’s been discussed ad nauseam, Blackwood was a member of the Golden Dawn. The Centaur is less of a novel or “supernatural story,” but rather more of a hermetic tome mixed with a vague story line. There are some deep passages and explanations of consciousness for those open to read them. This could be his best work or at least his most profound.
June 18, 2019
Eternal meandering
This could have been better written in fewer words. Very very little happens in so many pages. Read the first few chapters and the synopsis and you'll be better served.
This could have been better written in fewer words. Very very little happens in so many pages. Read the first few chapters and the synopsis and you'll be better served.
didn-t-finish
March 20, 2023I love Blackwood, but I have no idea what was going on in this story. At some point, the rambling, meandering way he was writing nearly put me to sleep, and I found that I've not been able to recover a semblance of the plot.
June 8, 2024
Now whenever someone asks we why I like waking up at 5 am to open a coffee shop, I’ll pull this one out of my pocket: “For every morning still, at dawn, the tired world knows again the splendors of her youth”
February 26, 2022
Not for me
Another will written wordy winded novel by Algernon Blackwood about a Irish 👦 lad. Give it a try. Enjoy reading 📚 novels 🔰🏡🏰😃 2022
Another will written wordy winded novel by Algernon Blackwood about a Irish 👦 lad. Give it a try. Enjoy reading 📚 novels 🔰🏡🏰😃 2022
August 6, 2024
Well, then. This is a classic (horror?) tale about a man who fell in love with and worshipped nature, or the earth. It can be a little hard to follow at times, but it is interesting. Somehow there is a little supernatural (not scary) element to the read. I'm not sure who I would recommend the book to. If I were to recommend this book, I would recommend it to people who love well written classics, mysticism, witchcraft, supernatural reads.
I really liked two of his other stories, "The Willows," and "The Wendigo." Both of those stories are excellent.
One lesson gleaned from this book follows:
People harbor different points of view. One inevitably sees things different from another. It is easy to assume that one may be enlightened by another, yet this is not always true and, in the attempt, to enlighten another, one may well strengthen their resolve to the exact contrary that a person intended. One other thing, the end of a person's life is just that, the end of their existence as it is known to those on earth. After then end of an earthly existence, there is no knowing what comes next until it comes. For me, I am Christian, and so I believe I know my end, but only the end will determine the validity of it.
I really liked two of his other stories, "The Willows," and "The Wendigo." Both of those stories are excellent.
One lesson gleaned from this book follows:
People harbor different points of view. One inevitably sees things different from another. It is easy to assume that one may be enlightened by another, yet this is not always true and, in the attempt, to enlighten another, one may well strengthen their resolve to the exact contrary that a person intended. One other thing, the end of a person's life is just that, the end of their existence as it is known to those on earth. After then end of an earthly existence, there is no knowing what comes next until it comes. For me, I am Christian, and so I believe I know my end, but only the end will determine the validity of it.
September 10, 2024
ultimately a slog
The Centaur is one of a long line of stories that seek to show the depth and beauty of a particular worldview. When it’s done right you are entertained even as you are informed and enlightened. Good examples are The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis (Christianity) or The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman (atheism). Algernon Blackwood appears to be doing something similar for pantheism in this book, but he did it poorly. Large swaths of this novel are repetitive and preachy. The basic premise is interesting, and there are parts of the story where you can see Blackwood’s talent for narrative and atmosphere shine through, but ultimately it just falls flat. This could have been a fine short story or maybe a novella, but as it stands I don’t recommend it.
The Centaur is one of a long line of stories that seek to show the depth and beauty of a particular worldview. When it’s done right you are entertained even as you are informed and enlightened. Good examples are The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis (Christianity) or The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman (atheism). Algernon Blackwood appears to be doing something similar for pantheism in this book, but he did it poorly. Large swaths of this novel are repetitive and preachy. The basic premise is interesting, and there are parts of the story where you can see Blackwood’s talent for narrative and atmosphere shine through, but ultimately it just falls flat. This could have been a fine short story or maybe a novella, but as it stands I don’t recommend it.
May 25, 2016
I was, at one point, a fan of Algernon Blackwood. However, recent experience of his wider work has left me in the curious position of really loving some of his stuff- the John Silence stories, the 'Wendigo' (apart from the ending), 'the willows', and assorted other short stories ('the glamour of snow' sticks in the mind as being fairly good), while loathing others- especially 'sand', 'the man the trees loved', and this novel.
It has been said, by S T Joshi that Blackwood is the most consistently good of weird fiction writers. I agree that he does indeed have a good turn off phrase, and effectively builds atmosphere- but there, certainly in this tale, it ends. In longer stories he gives over utterly to atmosphere, developing minimal plot, while taking an incredibly long time to do it. Sometimes, this is good. Othertimes, it stinks of all-flash, no substance.
To move from general remarks about the author's style to this novel, the problem with the centaur- which it took me a long time to articulate- is that the central section, the vision or mystical experience described, is far too saccharin to be effective. Disjointed as a dream, attempting to describe an experience which, by its nature, is ineffable (as the novel admits), it comes across as merely... twee. Add to this the long build-up to it, with its slow reveal and focus on minor experiences, and you have a book, much longer than it needs to be, with almost no plot, germs of ideas littering the way, and no real destination. You get the impression that even in the world of the novel, nothing has changed.
I do not recommend this, UNLESS you are a hard-core weird fiction or Blackwood fan, enjoy the literature of the period (Blackwood was writing from the mid 1800's to the mid 1900's) or are simply after a novel that is all atmosphere.
It has been said, by S T Joshi that Blackwood is the most consistently good of weird fiction writers. I agree that he does indeed have a good turn off phrase, and effectively builds atmosphere- but there, certainly in this tale, it ends. In longer stories he gives over utterly to atmosphere, developing minimal plot, while taking an incredibly long time to do it. Sometimes, this is good. Othertimes, it stinks of all-flash, no substance.
To move from general remarks about the author's style to this novel, the problem with the centaur- which it took me a long time to articulate- is that the central section, the vision or mystical experience described, is far too saccharin to be effective. Disjointed as a dream, attempting to describe an experience which, by its nature, is ineffable (as the novel admits), it comes across as merely... twee. Add to this the long build-up to it, with its slow reveal and focus on minor experiences, and you have a book, much longer than it needs to be, with almost no plot, germs of ideas littering the way, and no real destination. You get the impression that even in the world of the novel, nothing has changed.
I do not recommend this, UNLESS you are a hard-core weird fiction or Blackwood fan, enjoy the literature of the period (Blackwood was writing from the mid 1800's to the mid 1900's) or are simply after a novel that is all atmosphere.
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