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Terrestrials
The author of The Tent of Orange Mist, a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee, pens a panoramic novel about two American military pilots who find integration into civilian life as hard as war itself. 12,500 first printing.
- GenresFiction
384 pages, Hardcover
Published September 17, 1997
About the author
Paul West
124 books33 followersPaul 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.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 10, 2015
Essentially, Paul West is pulling a fast one, a big bait and switch, not that he doesn’t offer some hints that this is what he’s up to…
While there were long stretches that were admirable for the rich flow of language and the presentation/evocation of characters in situations odd and unique, this was not an easy novel to enjoy, even if at the end you are given by the author one more chance to make of the entire proceedings some other way to enjoy it. If as a reader you’re predisposed to read novels to observe the way they’re constructed—admiring the deliberate use of words to fabricate a story with characters and situations, where each page, each paragraph is a fresh application of shellac that serves to liven and make glisten its reality, as if appreciating how a table is made rather than how it might be used—then this novel’s nested matryoskhka doll construction will answer perfectly.
West’s verbal dexterity is for pages at a time thoroughly engrossing—evincing a facility that seamlessly serves… But what is served? The reader can pull back from the fabrication and observe that this or that segment of the novel must have given the author particular pleasure to write, or as likely observe how much research must have gone into learning the jargon to make this or that portion of the novel seem “real.” And there are the moments when you, the reader, ask, “When is West going to get these characters moving again?” and you realize, of course, that he’s tricked you again into believing he’s telling a story, that he’s successfully used his craft to create the illusion of characters in whom you’ve vested interest and even emotion. Readers are easy marks and most of us are willingly gullible, so what is the purpose of the artist vaunting his ability to gull us?
What appears to be the story about a pair of US reconnaissance pilots who crash land in the desert of North Africa, spend a month there before being rescued, then spend six months in de-brief before fleeing into obscurity in Pittsburgh for a year or so, then vaguely some time later appear in New York to operate tourist air trips over the Finger Lakes is at the end revealed to be the narrative of aliens who’ve embedded two of their kind into our terrestrial world. The aliens’ purpose is to learn of heroism and character, and to practice narrative technique. Just as the aliens have embedded pilots Clegg and Booth into the world, so the lead alien author embeds himself into the narrative—he says—as a mute, almost inert homunculus in order to “supervise” the narrative. It’s at this point the nested dolls construction of the novel seems to mobius (like West, I’m going all verbal on you, creating my own verb), like an Escher print where the origins and beginnings are merged and foreground is background.
Why play such a game for so many pages? From the how-to, DIY perspective of the fiction-writing manqué, this novel might serve as a tech manual, similar to the many Clegg and Booth refer to about the various planes they love or service. If uninterested in the clinical case study of the elaboration of an illusion or in the explanation of the construction of the illusion, then this novel is probably going to be more tedious and/or irritating than entertaining.
While there were long stretches that were admirable for the rich flow of language and the presentation/evocation of characters in situations odd and unique, this was not an easy novel to enjoy, even if at the end you are given by the author one more chance to make of the entire proceedings some other way to enjoy it. If as a reader you’re predisposed to read novels to observe the way they’re constructed—admiring the deliberate use of words to fabricate a story with characters and situations, where each page, each paragraph is a fresh application of shellac that serves to liven and make glisten its reality, as if appreciating how a table is made rather than how it might be used—then this novel’s nested matryoskhka doll construction will answer perfectly.
West’s verbal dexterity is for pages at a time thoroughly engrossing—evincing a facility that seamlessly serves… But what is served? The reader can pull back from the fabrication and observe that this or that segment of the novel must have given the author particular pleasure to write, or as likely observe how much research must have gone into learning the jargon to make this or that portion of the novel seem “real.” And there are the moments when you, the reader, ask, “When is West going to get these characters moving again?” and you realize, of course, that he’s tricked you again into believing he’s telling a story, that he’s successfully used his craft to create the illusion of characters in whom you’ve vested interest and even emotion. Readers are easy marks and most of us are willingly gullible, so what is the purpose of the artist vaunting his ability to gull us?
What appears to be the story about a pair of US reconnaissance pilots who crash land in the desert of North Africa, spend a month there before being rescued, then spend six months in de-brief before fleeing into obscurity in Pittsburgh for a year or so, then vaguely some time later appear in New York to operate tourist air trips over the Finger Lakes is at the end revealed to be the narrative of aliens who’ve embedded two of their kind into our terrestrial world. The aliens’ purpose is to learn of heroism and character, and to practice narrative technique. Just as the aliens have embedded pilots Clegg and Booth into the world, so the lead alien author embeds himself into the narrative—he says—as a mute, almost inert homunculus in order to “supervise” the narrative. It’s at this point the nested dolls construction of the novel seems to mobius (like West, I’m going all verbal on you, creating my own verb), like an Escher print where the origins and beginnings are merged and foreground is background.
Why play such a game for so many pages? From the how-to, DIY perspective of the fiction-writing manqué, this novel might serve as a tech manual, similar to the many Clegg and Booth refer to about the various planes they love or service. If uninterested in the clinical case study of the elaboration of an illusion or in the explanation of the construction of the illusion, then this novel is probably going to be more tedious and/or irritating than entertaining.
August 29, 2019
Blurb by William H. Gass:
“Paul West is an extraterrestrial, and while he flies over he sometimes looks down on us poor wordbirds pecking at our corn. The book itself soars. It is one of our finest. That means it is carefully planned, powerful and beautifully written. Hi, up there, Paul. Congratulations.”
“Paul West is an extraterrestrial, and while he flies over he sometimes looks down on us poor wordbirds pecking at our corn. The book itself soars. It is one of our finest. That means it is carefully planned, powerful and beautifully written. Hi, up there, Paul. Congratulations.”
July 1, 2008
Aaaarrrgghhh!!! what a slog. I tried, I really tried. Thought I'd learn something, but I just. couldn't. finish. it. There were a few oddly funny bits, and some wonderful phrases. And I know the whole point was how confusing and disjointed the characters' experiences were... but. No. I'm done.
February 16, 2022
Booth and Clegg shared an attitude to sex
not so much casual as
absentminded.
They sometimes yearned for
the open-cockpit camaraderie of
World War 1
when opponents waved at one another over
chattering slow guns.
When the outside skin temperature reached
over 400 degrees Fahrenheit
the Cyrano grew ten inches in length
an almost organic, human thing.
Not so much a milk run as a cream puff.
As if they had come from a different planet
to look at Earth, map it, and go back home for drinks.
Drinks of molten rock, meals of fungus
ingested through the pores of a Carborundum skin.
…
Whoever was running the operation was not
that knowledgeable.
Their adored Cyrano was
wreckage and dust.
Amazed to be so analytical
in spite of the heat
the nonstop assorted ills of his body
lack of any nourishment save the most elemental
he concluded that at saturation point
the creature you are either quits
or finds a new plateau from which to view the world.
He almost grinned:
skeletons would not surprise him
nor rotting heads, muzzled dogs
the furled-up flags of half the nations of Africa.
He achieved, as rarely, a mental halt
to match his physical quietus
the two halves of his being like two broomsticks
held end to end
with no give, no play, hardly any contact at all.
He was being weighed in the balance
while he dangled from the spur
while his flashlight helmet dangled in turn
beneath him
attracting no one.
…
Breathe deeply and slowly for a whole year.
…
Life was not over, it was just under grotesque attack
and openness to delusion, he figured, was what he needed
a certain reluctance to tell anyone what was going on
seven hells in wait but a hundred thousand bazaars on the way;
It was better to head for quarters in any establishment
that scrubbed its fainting couches and armchairs
bluntly offered rooms the shape of a half moon
& attached its keys to taxidermied hooves of goats, et al.
There was what Plato called virtue:
efficiency in performing an assigned function.
As for flying, to which both of them looked back
with fond ennui—
not only landing at enormous speed
tucking the stickball in his belly so as to flare
then easing the nosewheel forward until it squeaked;
to land was to resubmit to Earth’s laws and
during the flare when the Cyrano hovered
between slow flight and renewed contact with terra firma
—to become wholly passive
which had to be done with spritely finesse.
These old slant sixes, they got old fashioned character
—make a kind of mincemeat of themselves—hide in plain sight.
…
Like neutrinos on their way to Australia
lighting up the slum in which imagery rotted
and the windmill in which his mind
ground ideas to acorn dust;
a cross old wind
mere will will ferry them all the way to
the Category Three System
where tulip bulbs of light in rows
fifteen parsecs long
grow weary of being bright—
recoiling from go, get set, get ready
unlimbering into the past as the crack
of the gun travels back down
the barrel into the blank.
not so much casual as
absentminded.
They sometimes yearned for
the open-cockpit camaraderie of
World War 1
when opponents waved at one another over
chattering slow guns.
When the outside skin temperature reached
over 400 degrees Fahrenheit
the Cyrano grew ten inches in length
an almost organic, human thing.
Not so much a milk run as a cream puff.
As if they had come from a different planet
to look at Earth, map it, and go back home for drinks.
Drinks of molten rock, meals of fungus
ingested through the pores of a Carborundum skin.
…
Whoever was running the operation was not
that knowledgeable.
Their adored Cyrano was
wreckage and dust.
Amazed to be so analytical
in spite of the heat
the nonstop assorted ills of his body
lack of any nourishment save the most elemental
he concluded that at saturation point
the creature you are either quits
or finds a new plateau from which to view the world.
He almost grinned:
skeletons would not surprise him
nor rotting heads, muzzled dogs
the furled-up flags of half the nations of Africa.
He achieved, as rarely, a mental halt
to match his physical quietus
the two halves of his being like two broomsticks
held end to end
with no give, no play, hardly any contact at all.
He was being weighed in the balance
while he dangled from the spur
while his flashlight helmet dangled in turn
beneath him
attracting no one.
…
Breathe deeply and slowly for a whole year.
…
Life was not over, it was just under grotesque attack
and openness to delusion, he figured, was what he needed
a certain reluctance to tell anyone what was going on
seven hells in wait but a hundred thousand bazaars on the way;
It was better to head for quarters in any establishment
that scrubbed its fainting couches and armchairs
bluntly offered rooms the shape of a half moon
& attached its keys to taxidermied hooves of goats, et al.
There was what Plato called virtue:
efficiency in performing an assigned function.
As for flying, to which both of them looked back
with fond ennui—
not only landing at enormous speed
tucking the stickball in his belly so as to flare
then easing the nosewheel forward until it squeaked;
to land was to resubmit to Earth’s laws and
during the flare when the Cyrano hovered
between slow flight and renewed contact with terra firma
—to become wholly passive
which had to be done with spritely finesse.
These old slant sixes, they got old fashioned character
—make a kind of mincemeat of themselves—hide in plain sight.
…
Like neutrinos on their way to Australia
lighting up the slum in which imagery rotted
and the windmill in which his mind
ground ideas to acorn dust;
a cross old wind
mere will will ferry them all the way to
the Category Three System
where tulip bulbs of light in rows
fifteen parsecs long
grow weary of being bright—
recoiling from go, get set, get ready
unlimbering into the past as the crack
of the gun travels back down
the barrel into the blank.
July 16, 2025
the novel was a blob of crap in the end
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews