"Half way along the road we have to go,
I found myself obscured in a great forest,
Bewildered, and I knew I had lost the way."
So opens Dante's Inferno, the lines echo through the title and the opening pages of Claude Houghton's novel, 'Julian Grant Loses his Way' except in Grant's case the forest is rendered contemporary, we are in the West End of London in the 1930s; and, as we are to discover towards the end of the book, this is not a vision of the afterlife, it is a vision from the afterlife.
Grant finds himself adrift, on his way to a destination, yet unsure which. He stops off in the Metropolitan Cafe to drink a cocktail and gather his wits because the world has been behaving unwontedly strange. He has had a crystalline vision of memory - two people stand on a beach in Cornwall, looking out to sea. It is deeply familiar and he finds himself moving towards them to get a better perspective, to aid memory. As he approaches, he realizes that one of the figures is himself, twenty years ago, the other, Dorothy, the woman he was briefly engaged to and dropped brutally. How is such a picturing of memory possible, so real, tactile, in which you can participate both as figure and observer?
Once in the cafe, the narrative switches and we proceed, in wholly realist fashion, through incidents in Grant's life.
His lonely upbringing at The Hermitage where his father writes books on the metaphysical and the mystical, entertains acolytes, and is supported by his devoted wife to the implied neglect of the child - except for what must have been a highly esoteric version of homeschooling!
His departure to work in his uncle's solicitor's office and his first initiation into the patterns of ordinary life at the hands of his fellow clerk, Rawlings, an intelligently if disenchanted and alcoholic companion.
Then, with his father and mother's death, his inheritance of a fortune that launches him, independently, into society.
What follows is a compelling, if a partial account of his life, primarily focused on his interactions with women, following the abandoned Dorothy - the accomplished, beautiful and mysterious Stella, the haughty, proud Clytie and the instinctual, impulsive Madge. All of these women (and there are others), he proceeds to fail to recognize for themselves. All, whether it in his love, his hatred or his need are reduced to ciphers of his egotism. Indeed brilliant are the ways that Houghton shows the compelling nature of Grant's illusions, each different, shaped by circumstance though too projections that genuinely hook onto some pattern in the projected woman's needs. But the responsibility for Grant's failures is always clearly depicted as Grant's own.
Grant finds himself back, disorientated, and accompanied, in what appears as the landscape of dream, by an artist whom he has previously met coming out of the Metropolitan cafe as he entered. The artist, it transpires, is his initial guide to the afterlife; and, in the third section of the book, Julian is confronted, and seeks to evade, judgment. It is not a judgment that is imposed from without for the world he finds himself in simply reflects his own deepest interest (or love).
If that interest is selfless, loving, communal, you will find yourself in a responsive versioning of heaven. If that interest is egotistical, self-enclosed, antagonistic, or dominant, you will find yourself in a responsive versioning of hell.
It is a compelling novelistic account of Swedenborg's vision of Heaven and Hell where everyone is drawn to a reality that reflects their deepest interest - and indeed Houghton has the artist quote, Swedenborg, to Grant (assuming it familiar from his mystical childhood education) to try and reinforce his case that Grant is dead, should recognize it, and work to find his best self. A warning that goes unheeded. https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2012/01/marriage-of-heaven-and-hell.html
It was intriguing to find oneself reading this on Easter Saturday with its focus on Christ's harrowing of Hell. For Swedenborg, since each and every person is the body of Christ (with a breathtaking mystical literalism), everyone is called to harrow hell daily - to ponder whether my act, this act, right now, is a right 'use', an act that is liberation, that shapes my 'deepest' interest and leads it towards showing forth the divine and building up Christ's body, now and through death's portal? Or is it a misuse, a sheltering from the divine invitation, an act that binds, that self-encloses in a world of illusion, lacking love, hell?
Grant, in reflecting on the panorama he is offered in his life review in the cafe, imagines the incidents he is shown as partial, trivial even, to his life. He could have been shown a different selection casting on him a better light. But, as Houghton implies, and Swedenborg suggested, and as Christ pointedly affirms, it is how we treat others, the other, even at the margins, the littlest, that truly shows forth who we are, our deepest regarding?
Julian Grant Loses his Way is a sobering, beautifully imagined and executed novel asking us whether we know our own way?
Grant finds himself adrift, on his way to a destination, yet unsure which. He stops off in the Metropolitan Cafe to drink a cocktail and gather his wits because the world has been behaving unwontedly strange. He has had a crystalline vision of memory - two people stand on a beach in Cornwall, looking out to sea. It is deeply familiar and he finds himself moving towards them to get a better perspective, to aid memory. As he approaches, he realizes that one of the figures is himself, twenty years ago, the other, Dorothy, the woman he was briefly engaged to and dropped brutally. How is such a picturing of memory possible, so real, tactile, in which you can participate both as figure and observer?
Once in the cafe, the narrative switches and we proceed, in wholly realist fashion, through incidents in Grant's life.
His lonely upbringing at The Hermitage where his father writes books on the metaphysical and the mystical, entertains acolytes, and is supported by his devoted wife to the implied neglect of the child - except for what must have been a highly esoteric version of homeschooling!
His departure to work in his uncle's solicitor's office and his first initiation into the patterns of ordinary life at the hands of his fellow clerk, Rawlings, an intelligently if disenchanted and alcoholic companion.
Then, with his father and mother's death, his inheritance of a fortune that launches him, independently, into society.
What follows is a compelling, if a partial account of his life, primarily focused on his interactions with women, following the abandoned Dorothy - the accomplished, beautiful and mysterious Stella, the haughty, proud Clytie and the instinctual, impulsive Madge. All of these women (and there are others), he proceeds to fail to recognize for themselves. All, whether it in his love, his hatred or his need are reduced to ciphers of his egotism. Indeed brilliant are the ways that Houghton shows the compelling nature of Grant's illusions, each different, shaped by circumstance though too projections that genuinely hook onto some pattern in the projected woman's needs. But the responsibility for Grant's failures is always clearly depicted as Grant's own.
Grant finds himself back, disorientated, and accompanied, in what appears as the landscape of dream, by an artist whom he has previously met coming out of the Metropolitan cafe as he entered. The artist, it transpires, is his initial guide to the afterlife; and, in the third section of the book, Julian is confronted, and seeks to evade, judgment. It is not a judgment that is imposed from without for the world he finds himself in simply reflects his own deepest interest (or love).
If that interest is selfless, loving, communal, you will find yourself in a responsive versioning of heaven. If that interest is egotistical, self-enclosed, antagonistic, or dominant, you will find yourself in a responsive versioning of hell.
It is a compelling novelistic account of Swedenborg's vision of Heaven and Hell where everyone is drawn to a reality that reflects their deepest interest - and indeed Houghton has the artist quote, Swedenborg, to Grant (assuming it familiar from his mystical childhood education) to try and reinforce his case that Grant is dead, should recognize it, and work to find his best self. A warning that goes unheeded. https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2012/01/marriage-of-heaven-and-hell.html
It was intriguing to find oneself reading this on Easter Saturday with its focus on Christ's harrowing of Hell. For Swedenborg, since each and every person is the body of Christ (with a breathtaking mystical literalism), everyone is called to harrow hell daily - to ponder whether my act, this act, right now, is a right 'use', an act that is liberation, that shapes my 'deepest' interest and leads it towards showing forth the divine and building up Christ's body, now and through death's portal? Or is it a misuse, a sheltering from the divine invitation, an act that binds, that self-encloses in a world of illusion, lacking love, hell?
Grant, in reflecting on the panorama he is offered in his life review in the cafe, imagines the incidents he is shown as partial, trivial even, to his life. He could have been shown a different selection casting on him a better light. But, as Houghton implies, and Swedenborg suggested, and as Christ pointedly affirms, it is how we treat others, the other, even at the margins, the littlest, that truly shows forth who we are, our deepest regarding?
Julian Grant Loses his Way is a sobering, beautifully imagined and executed novel asking us whether we know our own way?
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