"Colin Greenland - A Passion For Lord Pierrot (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenland Colin)

A Passion for Lord Pierrot
a short story by Colin Greenland

Introduction

I wrote this story for David Garnett's Zenith 2 anthology, as another
in
the series of portraits of nasty men that includes Tarven Guille the
taxidermist in Other Voices and Isa's father the mad inventor in 'The
Wish'. What they share is a mastery of dubious science, an appalling
attitude towards women and an infinite capacity for arrogant, romantic
self-delusion. Mortimer Lychworthy, twenty-eighth Earl of Io and Master
of
the Guild of Aether Pilots, is obviously another of the same
fellowship.
Why I've been compelled to pillory these grotesque examples of extreme
tendencies in my own sex is a mystery to me. Presumably it's in some
sense
the other side of the more prominent mystery, which people always seize
upon and question me about when I'm on stage: why are all my novels
about
women?
Actually, I don't think it is a mystery, unless there's an equivalent
mystery in Mary Shelley writing about Victor Frankenstein or Ruth
Rendell
writing about Inspector Wexford. The mystery is perhaps why more men
haven't done it. That doesn't mean I know why I do it, though. I can
tell
you that it's not a matter of decision. The character always comes
first,
as a whole person, whose story I am to tell. What that story actually
is,
is a matter of many, many decisions, as is how I am to tell it. For
this
piece I adopted the Commedia dell'Arte imagery and elegiac,
bitter-sweet
tone I first encountered in works by Michael Moorcock, the chronicles
of
Jerry Cornelius and of the Dancers at the End of Time. The narrative
voice, detached, anonymous, but still quite personal, I also borrowed
from
Mike, before learning that he had also borrowed it, from George
Meredith.
It was one sentence in this story, the one about 'the gala concert on
Artemisia to celebrate the opening of the new Trans-Galactic Passage',
that gave me my first glimpse into the universe of Harm's Way.
-- CG

A Passion for Lord Pierrot