Colonel Mint

by Paul West

Book by Cherie A. Plant

Genres: Novels, Fiction

188 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Paul West (February 23, 1930) was an English-born novelist, literary historian and poet, the author of 24 novels, who lived in America since the early 1960s. He resided in upstate New York with his wife, the writer, poet and well-known naturalist Diane Ackerman, until his death in 2015. Paul, still remembered with affection by his old colleagues and friends in England as a big, jolly man, was born in Eckington, which is near (and now considered a part of) Sheffield in South Yorkshire, but was during West’s childhood a Derbyshire village associated with the famous literary Sitwells of Renishaw.
Paul was honoured with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award (1985), the Lannan Prize for Fiction (1993), the Grand Prix Halperine-Kaminsky Award (1993), and three Pushcart Prizes (1987, 1991, 2003). He was also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Literary Lion (1987), and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters 1996, France).
His parents, Alfred and Mildred, really cared for books, and created an environment which ensured that young Paul inherited a great passion for literature, which was enhanced when he went from his native village to study first at Oxford University in England and later at Columbia University in America. He never lived in England again after going to Columbia, and in later years Paul was involved with other US universities in teaching roles, notably Pennsylvania State University.
Paul West’s novels have included: ‘A Quality of Mercy’ (1961); ‘Tenement of Clay’ (1965); ‘Alley Jaggers’ (1966); ‘I'm Expecting to Live Quite Soon’ (1970); ‘Bela Lugosi's White Christmas’ (1972); ‘The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg’ (1980); ‘Rat Man of Paris’ (1986); ‘The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper’ (1991); and ‘OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday’ (2000).
His non-fiction has included the autobiographical ‘I, Said the Sparrow’, a delightful essay on his Eckington childhood; ‘The Growth of the Novel’ (1959), ‘The Modern Novel’ (in 2 vols, 1963); ‘Robert Penn Warren’ (1964); ‘Words for a Deaf Daughter’ (1969); ‘A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-discovery’ (1995); and the remarkable ‘The Shadow Factory’ (2008), the aphasic memoir he dictated with such struggle and resolve –it brings tears to the eyes and admiration to the heart, as we are reminded in reading it of the courage of this man. It is a ‘must-read’ in the context of the terrible stroke he suffered in 2003. Paul’s wife, Diane, also wrote about that stroke and its consequences in her book ‘One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage and the Language of Healing’. Paul’s poetry collections include ‘Poems’ (1952), ‘The Spellbound Horses’ (1960), and ‘The Snow Leopard’ (1964).


Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

This hilarious and shocking comic novel concerns the titular hero: an astronaut who witnesses the sighting of an angel from a spacecraft’s window. Upon his return he is isolated and interrogated by Lew R., whose task is to expunge the sighting from Mint’s mind. Among his techniques include the assassinations of two fellow astronauts, lowering Mint into a “five-foot-high tea-chest full of thick black ooze reeking of rancid fruit, cowsheds, and drains”, a sequence of violent sexual encounters with Connie Langoustine, a series of staged hallucinatory episodes, and continual poking from a strange taser-like gizmo named the Brabazon. The star of this novel is West’s athletic style, which compliments the surreal and baffling sequence of scenes presented: in terms of humour, we are closer to the overt sexism of Terry Southern and his ilk (each male character has plentiful sex with the unprotesting Connie), however, the satirical message here is sound: the Colonel could not tell the world he had seen an angel in space, for the implications for America and the world would be too large. The novel never strikes a tone of pathos, remaining in its frenetic comic mode throughout, but West plants this pip of pathos in our heads regardless. If one can excuse the period humour, Colonel Mint is a raucous and outrageous entertainment with a point in there somewhere (never too important).