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Prince Zaleski
by MP Shiel
(Tartarus
Press, £27.50, 187 pages, hardback, published 20 November
2002; ISBN: 1872621716.)
Review by William P Simmons
Admired by Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft for attaining an ethereal
wedding of cosmic awe and poetic unease beyond the grasp of his peers,
M.P. Shiel (1865-1947) is an author whose lyrical, emotionally-charged
style proved the perfect aesthetic vehicle with which to express ideas
both grandiose and macabre. Author of around 25 novels and dozens of
short stories, including ornamental mysteries, exotic adventures, scientific
romances, supernatural horror, and the grotesque detective narratives
which this review concerns itself with, Shiel, a great thinker whose
eyes looked into the soul even as they gazed towards ethereal heavens
(lending a sense of dual mysticism and earthly relevance to his fantasies),
interwove philosophical and sociological discourse into carefully structured
labyrinths of language.
Often exploring the philosophical resonance of the "Overman" in fictions
laden with a rich, baroque atmosphere and decadent plot-lines mixing
images of conservatively determined beauty with the Gothic sensibilities
of shadow, decay, and spiritual alienation, Shiel created in the emotionally
mysterious, super-human intellect of Prince Zaleski, an exotic flesh-and-blood
representation of cosmic independence and cold intellectual power, perhaps
his most memorable character. Exiled from his native land (and later,
self-exiled from the common affairs of men, which hold little attractiveness
for an almost Faustian figure who has seen and felt all of which low,
common humanity has to offer), Zaleski is neither a simplistic mirror-image
of the traditional Byronic anti-hero nor a mythically reflected image
of the Faustian-figure despite the similarities of mood, action, and
spirit which he shares his still-life with. Lacking the self-hating,
melodramatic angst of the traditional doomed gothic anti-hero/villain
of the Romantic period as well as the uncontrollable greed for experience
exhibited in both Goethe and Marlow's Faustus interpretations, Shiel's
Zaleski is a curious contradiction of principles and cultural image,
desires and motivations, the enigmatic mystery of his intentions a principle
reason for the character's success. Zaleski frees his mind and sense
of purpose by removing himself from the banality of the everyman, requiring
the "narrator" -- a quasi-imitation to the Watson figure so crucial
to the movement of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories -- to bring to his
attractively gloomy confines the confounding crimes and sensational
quandaries of the outside world that replenish and further identify
him by allowing his deductive powers and esoteric speculations practical
outlets. Above the concerns of most men, Zaleski is nevertheless refreshed
by his ability to expose faults in humanities typical reasoning process
and reactions to the macabre.
Prince Zaleski, an impressive, attractive offering to the macabre
enthusiast's library, presents ample evidence of the title character's
decadent mysticism and Shiel's prowess as a stylist, building torrents
of acrobatic logic and emotional overflow with solidly layered, carefully
sequenced building-blocks of description and pacing. Featuring the three
tales which comprised Shiel's original collection, including "The Race
Or Orven", "The Stone Of The Edmundsbury Monks", and "The S.S.", the
Tartarus edition follows Shiel's single work with the posthumously published
"collaborations" conducted by John Gawsworth, who re-worked the outlines
of further Zaleski tales in Shiel's papers, resulting in the equally
fine if somewhat less decadent The Return Of Prince Zaleski,
including "The Murena Murder", "The Missing Merchants", and "The Hargen
Inheritance". Although these later are revered for continuing Zaleski's
gloom-laden exploits of "armchair detection" in print, the earliest
Zaleski pieces are superior as both fictional art and as expressions
of the decadent literary movement they both strengthened and challenged
in the character of the Prince.
The Decadent movement, itself dependent on unsolvable emotional and
philosophical contradictions that, if conquered, drained the perverse
pessimism and act of inaction of its significance, is reflected intimately
in both the "The Race Of Orven", whereupon a deteriorating aristocratic
family resorts to intrigue and murder to cover up the ravages of syphilis,
and in "The Stone Of The Edmundsbury Monks", which features the apparent
theft of a semi-mystical jewel whose hinted mystical properties and
mocking condemnations of man's instinctively flawed reasoning ability.
In both these narratives Shiel creates in his physically still, intellectually
active Zaleski a probable successor to Poe's C. Auguste Dupin which
is discussed further by Brian Stableford in his intriguing introduction.
More importantly for our purpose, Shiel's earliest Zaleski narratives
depict him no less as a memento mori than the exotically gloomy furnishings
within which he surrounds himself. Whereas most traditional detection
leans more towards the suspense sub-genre, relying on physical foot-work
and 'tea-time' deduction to accompany (and often instigate) the mental
deduction of crime, Zaleski's plots focus primarily on thought-patterns,
eschewing "action" in true decadent fashion.
Thoughts themselves, then, and the mental process of Zaleski, could
be interpreted as the true characters of these fascinating narratives,
and to these the reader's attention might best rest, particularly on
the third tale, "The S.S.", which proves both the cumulative triumph
and philosophical failing of the physically weak, narcotic-loving proponent
of Shiel's favored "Overman". The only of the original stories where
the Prince requires the aid of physical action (itself symbolic of forward
progression, a contrary impulse to decadent thought), Shiel purposefully
or unconsciously suggests the inability of decadence, as represented
through Zaleski, to remain true to its lethargic acceptance of decline
when the Prince has to leave his couch and roam secret streets to discover
the mysterious plot beneath a horrid rash of apparent suicides. On the
other hand, as fiction, "The S.S.", is, to my mind, Shiel's deductive
masterstroke, forcing Zaleski to philosophically and emotionally confront
none other than himself through the physical/intellectual confrontation
against a secret society whose emotionally cold goals he supports but
whose motives he finds, like himself, lacking -- something that cannot
be said of this collection, which included by way of bonus the physical
attractiveness expected in a Tartarus title and "A Note On The Zaleski
Stoires", by R. B. Russell.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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