Krishna
This book is a lesson to all aspiring writers. There is a saying that you learn more from mistakes than successes and by that yardstick, there is a hell of a lot to learn about writing from this book. If you don’t need those lessons, you are better off staying far off from its vicinity.
The author (a character) is talking about the loss of his sister Elizabeth and how he misses her. He seems to be leaving her, against her wishes. His innkeeper is a kind lady but her husband is a vile person. She makes him drunk one day and then he writes the story. What is the story?
Tiberius Caesar conquered Albion (England) and having subdued it, triumphantly visited it, building roads at great speed as he came. The irony? He dragged his feet and could not put one foot properly in front of the other. He had a stutter in addition. It stops a short distance from Shooter’s Hill, which used to be called the Hill of Blood.
Bartholomew Greene is a page of Sir Endimion Lee. They are travelling to the Palace of Placentia, where Her Imperial Majesty Elizabeth is waiting for them. But when a glittering ghostly carriage appears, Sir Lee sends Bart away and goes to investigate. When he climbs into the empty coach, it suddenly travels with him in it.
He reaches a magical palace and is received by stunning looking young women.
My God, what blather. The moon goddess is the Moon and this whole book lusts after women, Sir Lee on the Moon Goddess who comes semi naked so that he may feast his eyes on her and the biography of the writer lusting after (and imagining coupling with) two women, one of whom is his sister (Yup, not in sarcasm but written in full earnest manner).
And the flowery language is so bad – not the aristocratic one used by Alistair McLean but a stupid version – that it is difficult to follow the point that anyone is making (especially in the story).
The blather increases where Cynthia Brown openly flirts with him and in today’s world gives him a ton of come hither clues. The whole stupid thing goes nowhere just description of how lovely every woman is, and they go exposing their breasts at the drop of a hat but everyone behaves chastely. Well, admirable if you do not want to read just smut but if nothing at all happens, both in the story he is writing and also in his life, it gets very tiring very quickly to go on reading.
And stupid musings of his where he imagines another writer some hundred of years hence coming right there and writing about moon (his obsession of course) is ridiculous. Boring as the story is, the author is in total love with it, and wonders if the moon goddess herself came into his mind and made him write ‘such wonderful words’. You want to tear up each page of the book and throw it into the fire. (Or delete the book if an electronic copy).
He seems to like chestnut hair and brown eyes and hates a beautiful girl who was eyeing him because ‘she had blue eyes’. Also a story within a story within a story ensues but unfortunately all of the heroes just lust after boobs and the moon so it looks like the same story. At that he marvels at how his pen produced such great epics and whether the moon goddess was directing his hand. If this is the case, the moon goddess has both poor sense and even poorer imagination.
He moans about Christianity sweeping away pagan religions. Even more crappy is the imagined sequence. The book was written in 2011. The “author” in the story writed in 1911 or so. He writes about a knight in 1811 or so. Endemion Lee, the knight reads his own story written 100 years after. The author in the story wonders if his story was written hundred years later. Luckily no one wonders what would happen in 2011, thank God! Obsession about boobs and lots of convoluted thinking round and round make up the entire story.
And Endemion sees a play performed that he is yet to write. OK but since that play is so boring as to put the most severe insomniac to instant sleep, I wish it had never been written!
Then, again women prance around kissing – mostly with their breasts exposed – and let his (both Endemion in the story and the story author) touch and caress where they want but not one of them could or would have sex. They find a way to rule it out or run away without explanation. After the two hundredth time of this, you don’t know what else is there in the story.
And here’s the thing. Even if it is the Moon Goddess itself, she admires the British Queens. Wait, what? And fashions her castle upon the castles in England. Talk about the conceit. (And more explicit statements like ‘untouched by the swarthy hands of the Mohammetans’ abound in the book). The empire mentality in a book written after the year 2000? Surprising, that.
This has multiple stories within stories kind of thing going on, albeit very poorly. However, in all those stories it is a man who meets one or many young girls who all strip naked and let him kiss them, run his hands over them but no more than that. In all stories he has a sister whom he wants badly to take to bed, adores anything that is feminine in a sexual way but nothing happens. In other words, all those stories are identical and equally stupid.
One of the most boring books I have read recently.
1/10
– – Krishna (March 2019)