Liam
Administrator
Rayner Heppenstall (1911-1981) was a British poet, critic and novelist of considerable depth, briefly associated with the modernists but diverging from them in significant ways. Recently his reputation has dimmed after it emerged (from the publication of his private diaries, as I understand it) that he was a racist, elitist snob who hated entire groups of people for no other reason than that he didn't like them.
His first novel, The Blaze of Noon (1939), was also the one I happened to read first a few years ago. The challenge it sets its writer is to describe the world from the point of view of a blind narrator. At the time, it was praised for its psychological acuity and its innovative use of language, but the books that followed were more generic, until Heppenstall began experimenting with the form of the novel under the influence of the French nouveau roman.
I picked up his last, posthumously published work of fiction, The Pier (1986) while I was away on holiday thinking it would be a quick read. The story has an interesting premise: a crime writer in his 60s (perhaps 70s) is provoked to murder his noisy neighbors. The trouble is, he is also writing a book about a man very much like himself, who sets out to murder his neighbors as well. By the end of the novel, the reader is left wondering about what is truth and what is fiction and if, indeed, it even matters for someone like our narrator.
The story, stretched to just under two hundred pages, is filled with meaningless minutiae and endless (I'm not kidding) descriptions of the narrator's visits to the dentist. It was a slow, excruciatingly boring read, and it took me weeks to finish as I derived neither joy nor interest from reading it (sometimes a book you are not exactly "enjoying" proves to be interesting in other ways: this is how I feel about most of Hemingway).
Seeing as we have no thread on this writer, I thought I would share my brief encounter with him here. Although his wiki bio is the obvious first point of entry, I was very taken with this lengthy write-up by G. J. Buckell for the Dalkey Archive Press. It describes the author's life with nuance and grace, and provides an overview of his work, fiction and non-fiction both, in a comprehensive way.
For what it's worth, if anyone will want to acquaint themselves at some point with this semi-forgotten British author, I would suggest The Blaze of Noon as the obvious place to start, unless you're looking for something to cure your insomnia, in which case give The Pier a go!
His first novel, The Blaze of Noon (1939), was also the one I happened to read first a few years ago. The challenge it sets its writer is to describe the world from the point of view of a blind narrator. At the time, it was praised for its psychological acuity and its innovative use of language, but the books that followed were more generic, until Heppenstall began experimenting with the form of the novel under the influence of the French nouveau roman.
I picked up his last, posthumously published work of fiction, The Pier (1986) while I was away on holiday thinking it would be a quick read. The story has an interesting premise: a crime writer in his 60s (perhaps 70s) is provoked to murder his noisy neighbors. The trouble is, he is also writing a book about a man very much like himself, who sets out to murder his neighbors as well. By the end of the novel, the reader is left wondering about what is truth and what is fiction and if, indeed, it even matters for someone like our narrator.
The story, stretched to just under two hundred pages, is filled with meaningless minutiae and endless (I'm not kidding) descriptions of the narrator's visits to the dentist. It was a slow, excruciatingly boring read, and it took me weeks to finish as I derived neither joy nor interest from reading it (sometimes a book you are not exactly "enjoying" proves to be interesting in other ways: this is how I feel about most of Hemingway).
Seeing as we have no thread on this writer, I thought I would share my brief encounter with him here. Although his wiki bio is the obvious first point of entry, I was very taken with this lengthy write-up by G. J. Buckell for the Dalkey Archive Press. It describes the author's life with nuance and grace, and provides an overview of his work, fiction and non-fiction both, in a comprehensive way.
For what it's worth, if anyone will want to acquaint themselves at some point with this semi-forgotten British author, I would suggest The Blaze of Noon as the obvious place to start, unless you're looking for something to cure your insomnia, in which case give The Pier a go!
