Maurice Rowdon : Fiction

Perimeter West

Perimeter West

William Heineman Ltd – London 1956 / Ringlinie West – S Fischer Verlag 1956
A parable of the Berlin ruins

Reviews

‘For all who care for literature that concerns itself with the things that really happen and really matter, Perimeter West is a novel to notice. It is original; it’s vision is simple and mature; and it speaks for a generation unacclimatised to peace and quiet’
‘Whenever he is creating the atmosphere of this island city Mr Rowdon's writing achieves great power and fierce direction...a forbidding but desperately sincere book.’ Books and Bookmen
‘We have no experience of this type of life here, but it has happened in Europe, and Rowdon brings home with great force the insecurity and tension which follow in the wake of an occupation.’ Evening Herald
‘Mr Rowdon's power of description reach their greatest heights in an endeavour to freeze the blood of his readers. He does this so very successfully that the picture of the coldest of cold wars slowly killing a city blasted by a brief and again unidentified hot war, is a terrifying one.’ Liverpool Daily Post
‘The most important novel to come to us out of England since 1945. The English will hardly value the real significance of this book. His book deals with the war and its spiritual meaning. The theme is fear, force, terror and horror.’ Welt und Wort

Excerpt

During these three years General Dessman had been Mayor, and he more than anyone was responsible for the building of the new city out of the ruins, for the electricity supply, for the cleaning of the sewers, for the quick demolitions, for the opening of schools and the university, for the institution of poor relief, for the charity camps in the forest at Lake End, for the opening of theatres and cinemas along Main Street, and for the restoration of the vast Technics factory on the east side of the canal. [Download PDF more... ]

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Afterwards

Afterwards

Barrie and Radcliffe – London 1967
An American publicity-agent sees Hiroshima as dividing history into the Before-The-Bomb and the afterward – the final step of dementia. The war to end all wars and dreams of the exploitation of space, thus foretelling fifty years of space-experiment by the USA and Britain.

Review

‘a real pleasure coming across a quite original book’

Excerpt

I’d just like to say this, Glen’, he murmured, suddenly moving close to me with energy, ‘I wrote this book Afterwards to save humanity in the event of a nuclear war, and that went all over the world as my advocating nuclear war. Now I wouldn’t mind if people knew what I meant by the Afterwards but they don’t. They think I mean after the bomb falls – in the future. But I don’t! I mean now. Remember what Macbeth said after his first murder – ‘From this instant there’s nothing serious in mortality’? And then he says, ‘All is but toys, grace and renown is dead’ (they weren’t too hot on their grammar in those days), ‘the wine of life is drawn’. [more.. ]

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Hellebore the Clown

Hellebore the Clown

Chatto & Windus – London 1953
A professional clown’s guilty encounter with his dead son’s closest friend, who had watched him die on the battlefield.

Reviews

‘it reveals more than a dash of originality and takes the reader to the heart of an unhackneyed emotional situation.’ Birmingham Post
‘One of the truest novels I have ever read...the scene in which Hellebore gradually recovers himself and by a mixture of the Chaplin technique and other custard-pie slap-stick regain the audience's affection and confidence, is one of the best bits of writing I have read for some time.’ Nigel Nicolson, Daily Despatch Manchester
‘a remarkably assured performance, particularly in its early states. Here is a fresh, vigorous and altogether unusual talent.’ Morchard Bishop, John O'London' Weekly

Excerpt

It was a hill in Sussex during the early spring of 1907, at dawn. A group of actors stood on the crest with Hellebore, while the others strolled down to a path which crossed the valley. On the right of the hill was the road leading back to London, and waiting there at this moment were the four hackney carriages belonging to the company. The coachmen were gathered round the first carriage polishing wine-glasses and putting them on a large silver tray. [Download PDF more... ]


Published Stories

From Travels and Tales

No Enemy But Time: Harper’s Magazine

Adolf Hitler’s House: Cornhil

Miriam and the Road to Arezzo: Housewife

The Honest Cove: Oxford

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Fiction: Unpublished

How To Stop Dying In California 1984

A send-up of the personal growth therapies and a Lodestar fable. Love pulls the protagonists further and further away from each other until finally they are only ‘together’ thousands of miles apart.

Excerpt

As I made my way by stages to San Francisco (Alitalia from Rome to London, British Airways from London to San Francisco) I recalled the old Gold Rush song:
Oh Sally, dearest Sally
Oh Sally for your sake,
I’ll go to Californy
An’ try to raise a stake!
[Download PDF more... ]


Dead Sunday: A Journey into the Underworld

Deceptively like a horror story with much action but it is constantly turning into something else. Coma or the real world? The protagonist loses track of which is which.

Excerpt

I knew every fitting in that apartment, though it was neither mine nor properly speaking an apartment. There were no windows or doors. A narrow arch in the wall led to the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. At the end of a wide corridor there was a decompression chamber with a deep steel porthole-entrance. When closed and sealed this porthole became an elevator to the surface, to be used in the case of emergency or at the end of the operation. [Download PDF more... ]

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Night Fevers: Two Englishwomen in New York

Excerpt

Apparently what happened was that Anthea, after her arrival in New York – dressed in a Thirties cloche hat and a multiple pleated skirt that gathered at a tiny waist and billowed like a ballerina's tutu when she swung round (as she did when she turned a corner in the subway to run up the stairs) – went straight from the Village apartment she was about to share where the walls were naked brick and the bath squeezed into a corner of the kitchen, straight from there (I'm so feverishly eager to tell the tale I'm stumbling over my words) to the seventeenth floor office on Madison Avenue where Beatty Masumerov was – provided she hadn't forgotten the appointment – waiting for her.


Sophia the Wild

2010 note: Maurice wrote in 1974 ‘When the eye of wisdom (third eye) opens (ajna chakra) Shiva and Parvati lose their sexual nature and become a hermaphrodite. But beyond the ajna chakra, where the final bliss comes with the opening of the 1000 petalled lotus, sexuality may re-establish itself. In the Sahasrara they are in sexual union again.’

To an editor in 1976 he wrote: ‘This is a disguised Indian cult book about a hermaphrodite called Sophia and her affairs with other women. It plays between New York and an island in the southern Mediterranean. All the characters speak in the first person, and have to be identified by the reader solely through their style of speech. To young people familiar with words like kundalini, and accustomed to Indian disciplines it comes easy. But others don’t know where they are. It has been to Chatto, Cape (‘mostly impossible to understand, and dull when possible’—Tom Maschler), Constable (‘a commendable try, but no quarter is given to the reader’), Bodley Head (‘readers should protected against this kind of book’), Hutchinson and Goallancz. In the States Rosemary Macomber of Georges Borchardt said she could hardly try to place a book she couldn’t make head or tail of, but did try it at David’ Bolt’s request on Tony Godwin who turned it down.’

Review

‘ 'I have read Maurice Rowdon's new book with ceaseless wonder and was frequently put in mind of the later Bunuel films in which one image so lightly attends upon the next as to challenge all one's wits. It is a very difficult book. And alas, no I cannot make you an offer for it. I hope you find a good home for it as it deserves. ‘ Chatto & Windus

Excerpt

After wandering many days I at last found myself between a woman’s legs, which is where all of us begin. It is worthwhile to remember this origin. They were a woman’s legs, not a man’s. I suppose all my life has been concentrated on that one fact. The woman whose legs I wandered into was a raw, long-haired peasant girl with eyes that glowered without the slightest light in them.


Under Construction

Janet

2010 note: David Bolt, his agent sent out, ‘Those who have read Rowdon’s previous novel Afterwards will know not to accept the surface of his books but to look for many more levels than the obvious one. There always lurks a dark and troubled world underneath, however logical the outward situation. Janet is a woman living in the green belt of a dormitory town near London. She ‘thinks’ as her husband says, ‘always thinking!’ And what she thinks uncovers the folly and craven mediocrity of the men round her, even her husband. The women are better, she thinks. And perhaps Ruth’s husband is better too. He has a job that takes him on the continent. He says they’re more civilized over there, that the English are barbarians. And f it makes her own husband more craven, with his evil-smelling ciagarettes. But it is he who acts. He changes – almost – into the man she wants. But not by ‘thinking’, as she finds out. Rowdon himself describes this books as the story of a bright woman in the land of philistines.


Incarcerecstacy: A Manual of Self-Avancement

My Wife Emily

Waiting for Melli

Night of the Eclipse

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