Five Wounds: Dogs

 

Dogs occupy a prominent and sinister role in Five Wounds, partly because of events in the autobiographical backstory to the novel. But there are other reasons for this canine presence. Dogs are ubiquitous in modern Venice, which is actually quite baffling given the lack of parks in the city. Hence Venetian streets are notoriously littered with dog shit, which no-one ever bothers to clean up. Considering this, I imagined a variation on Kipling's animal tales ('How the cat got his tail', 'How the camel got his hump', etc.), in which a child might ask her father, 'Why are there so many dogs in Venice, daddy, and why are they so spoilt?', and the answer might be, 'Well, daughter, once upon a time, the dogs ruled this city, and they still have their ancestral privileges, although they have no real power any more'.

Below I review a menagerie of fictional and literary dogs, many of whom were barking away down in my subconscious as I wrote. I am just listing the ones that come immediately to mind now as I write. I didn't ever make a comprehensive list, and I omit here several relevant examples already mentioned in Dan's post about the Black Dog.

The most explicit historical reference to dogs in Five Wounds is to a passage from the Hierogylphics of Horapollo, which is quoted by Crow in the chapter 'A Meeting of Minds', as follows (I may have tweaked the text slightly to fit the context; I don't have the original in front of me):

When the Egyptians wish to indicate a scribe, or a prophet, or an embalmer, or the spleen, or a judge, they draw the hieroglyph of a dog. A scribe, since he who wishes to become an accomplished scribe must bark continually and be fierce and show favours to none, just like dogs. And a prophet, because the dog looks intently beyond all other beasts upon the images of the gods, like a prophet. And an embalmer, because he looks upon the bodies which he has taken care of naked and dissected. And the spleen, since the dog alone among other animals has a very light spleen. If death of madness overcomes him, it happens because of his spleen. And a judge, because as the dog gazes intently upon the images of the gods, so the judge of ancient times contemplated the king in his nakedness.

Horapollo's treatise is a neo-Platonic interpretion of Egyptian hieroglyphs from the early Christian era. It was very influential in the Renaissance, but it is based upon almost entirely erroneous premises, a fact that was not proved conclusively until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in the nineteenth century. Horapollo therefore fits the theme of interpretation / misinterpretation that runs through Five Wounds, which is why I was reading the treatise in the first place, but then I came across the passage on dogs, which could be made to fit my five protagonists.

Other dog references are less openly acknowledged, like the famous last line from Kafka's The Trial, 'Like a dog', which is quoted above in a comic-strip version of the novel, adapted by David Mairowitz and Chantal Montellier. The phrase is Joseph K.'s final reflection upon himself, and upon his treatment at the hands of the law, as the executioner's knife descends. Here the dog is a figure of the abject, of the pariah, who is excluded from human society, like the outlaw of medieval legend, whose figure is the wolf.

Several dogs in Dante's Inferno are rendered below in William Blake's illustrations. The first image is of the three-headed Cerberus, the guardian of the underworld from classical mythology (Dante's text, like Five Wounds, jumbles its mythological and historical frames of reference). In the Inferno, Cerberus torments the souls of the gluttonous, whose fate is elucidated in Dorothy L. Sayers' commentary, as follows (p. 107):

The Gluttonous: The surrender to sin which began with mutual indulgence leads by an imperceptible degradation to solitary self-indulgence. Of this kind of sin, the Gluttons are chosen as the image. Here is no reciprocity and no communication; each soul grovels alone in the mud, without heeding his neighbours - "a sightless company", Dante calls them. .... [Cerberus] is the image of uncontrolled appetite; the Glutton, whose appetite preyed upon people and things, is seen to be, in fact, the helpless prey on which that appetite gluts itself.



Later in the Inferno, Dante and Virgil travel through the Wood of the Suicides, in which the souls of the inhabitants are imprisoned in sterile trees. The trees cannot speak, unless their branches are broken, whereupon they bleed, and they can whistle through the coagulating blood, until it clots, when they are once again condemned to silence. Also trapped in the Wood of the Suicides are the Profligates, who run through it, pursued eternally by black dogs (aha!), and in fleeing, they tear the branches from the bleeding trees as they pass.



In the Inferno, dogs are therefore associated with the gluttonous and the profligate, and the latter group is also associated with suicide: All these ideas can also be linked to the theme of addiction.

At the beginning of the Inferno, dogs are also associated with avarice via the figure of one of the three beasts that terrify Dante in canto 1 (see illustration below): the She-Wolf, who can only be vanquished by the prophesied Greyhound, the Master-hound. Here is Sayers again on this image (p. 75):

The Beasts [Leopard, Lion and She-Wolf]: These are the images of sin. They may be identified with Lust, Pride, and Avarice respectively, or with the sins of Youth, Manhood, and Age; but they are perhaps best thought of as the images of the three types of sin .... The Greyhound has been much argued about. I think it has both an historical and a spiritual significance. Historically, it is perhaps the [p. 76] image of some hoped-for political saviour who should establish the just World-Empire. Spiritually, the Greyhound, which has the attributes of God (“wisdom, love, and power”), is probably the image of the reign of the Holy Ghost on earth – the visible Kingdom of God for which we pray in the Lord’s Prayer.



The following passage from Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 152, refers to Albrecht Durer's engraving of Melancholy (which features a sleeping - no doubt dreaming - dog), and which 'portrays the dangers of excessive study', a highly relevant theme for Gabriella and Crow:

One of the properties assembled around Durer's figure of Melancholy is the dog. The similarity between the condition of the melancholic, ... and the state of rabies, is not accidental. According to ancient tradition 'the spleen is dominant in the organism of the dog'. This he has in common with the melancholic. If the spleen, an organ believed to be particularly delicate, should deteriorate, then the dog is said to lose its vitality and become rabid. In this respect it symbolizes the darker aspect of the melancholy complexion. On the other hand the shrewdness and tenacity of the animal were borne in mind, so as to permit its use as the image of the tireless investigator and thinker. 'In his commentary on this hieroglyph Piero Valeriano says explicitly that the dog which "faciem melancholicam prae se ferat" [bears a melancholy face] would be the best at tracking and running'. In Durer's engraving [of Melancholy], especially, the ambivalence of this is enriched by the fact that the animal is depicted asleep: bad dreams come from the spleen, but prophetic dreams are also the prerogative of the melancholic.

 

Coincidentally, Dan also discusses Durer's Melancholy in relation to another illustration for Five Wounds, although it was not a reference that either of us ever mentioned to each other.

Another source I came across in the British Library in 2006, while I was researching Goya, is an English translation by Abraham Fleming of a Latin treatise by Johannes Caius, On English Dogs, first published in 1576. The following passage is from p. 17:

Of the dog, called the Thievish dog; in Latin, Canis furax.

The like to that whom we have rehearsed, is the Thievish Dog, which at the mandate and bidding of his master fleereth and leereth in the night: hunting conies by the air, which is leavened with their savour; and conveyed to the sense of smelling by the means of the wind blowing towards him. During all which space of his hunting he will not bark, lest he should be prejudicial to his own advantage. And thus watching and snatching in course as many conies as his master will suffer him; and beareth them to his master’s standing. The farmers of the country, and uplandish dwellers, call this kind of dog a Night Cur; because he hunteth in the dark.

I took one of the running heads in Five Wounds from this passage: 'Leavened With Their Savour'. Interpreted in the context of the novel, this passage might also be a way of linking the character of Cur, the dog-man, to that of Magpie, the nocturnal thief.

Finally, the barking of dogs represents the idea of non-sense or 'noise' (as opposed to 'signal' in information theory), as in the following passage from A. S. Byatt's Babel Tower, in which an expert witness testifies in court during an obscenity trial that serves as the novel's climax. The book on trial here is Babbletower, an allegory written by one of the characters within Byatt's novel, excerpts of which interrupt the frame narrative, along with several other competing, interpolated texts:

Well, let us start with the title. La Tour Bruyarde translates as the noisy, or shouting, or howling tower – the word ‘bruyard’ suggests the noise made by hound dogs. It is an image of the Tower of Babel which was constructed to displace God from Heaven, and was punished for its presumption by having a spirit of discord sent amongst its members, so that their languages were confused, they could no longer understand each other.

Christian Fantasy

My novel The Angels of L19 is a work of Christian fantasy, according to the definition of Colin Manlove: 

What we are concerned with are works [of fiction] which give substantial and unambiguous place to other worlds, angels, devils, Christ figures, miraculous or supernatural events (biblical or otherwise), objects of numinous power, and mystical relationship with some approximation of the deity; and all under the aegis of Christian belief. 

This doesn’t mean that the book has any evangelical purpose. I’m not even a practising Christian, although I grew up in that world. But it does mean that the book takes Christian belief and the Christian supernatural seriously in the conviction that an engagement with Christianity is an engagement with moral and existential questions that should be of interest to anyone. 

I wrote this novel for a doctorate in creative writing, and one of my arguments in my thesis is that Christian fantasy cannot be entirely orthodox in its theology. For it to work as fantasy, it must trespass beyond the bounds of orthodoxy: not necessarily by contradicting received belief, but certainly by supposing things of which canonical texts are silent (which it does not, of course, present as true). All the great historical examples of the genre do this: The Divine Comedy, Dr Faustus, Paradise Lost – even C. S. Lewis’s science-fiction trilogy. 

Conversely, Christian fantasy that is committed above all else to advancing particular theological speculations as true not only commits a category error, but is usually shallow and kitsch as fiction: betraying the profundity of the truths it ostensibly tries to communicate. 

Here I’d like to offer some possible comparisons to the way my book approaches the question of Christian belief. If you think the examples that follow have something to offer the Christian (or non-Christian) reader or viewer, you may find something of value in my book as well. If you think these examples are impious or blasphemous, chances are you won’t like what I’m doing either. 

Not all of these examples concern the fantastic or the Christian supernatural (and the last on the list is not even literature/fiction), but they're all useful comparisons for the way I've approached questions of faith in my novel.

Charles Williams: I shall discuss Williams in more detail in a dedicated post, since he’s an important precedent for me, and my treatment of the supernatural is directly inspired by his novels. I’ll only note here that he’s been adopted by evangelicals (and others) as a respectable author largely because of his membership of the Inklings, the Oxford group in which Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were also members. His work was admired by Lewis in particular. But his actual beliefs and practice as a Christian, and the ways in which these were translated into his fiction, were rather stranger than that association implies. In particular, his interest in magic and ritual place him in a tradition going back to people like John Dee, and other Renaissance philosophers who saw no contradiction between Christianity and magic. Anyway, more on Williams later and elsewhere. 

Flannery O’Connor: O’Connor is also a respectable Christian writer, in the sense that assessing her in these terms is relatively uncontroversial, perhaps in large part because she wrote about herself as such eloquently and persuasively. But if one were to read her fiction without knowing this, one might conclude that her intent was to parody and mock Christian belief. Consider ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ in which the climactic revelation of divine grace appears to come at the murdering hands of a serial killer. Or 'The River', in which a character seeking the purification of baptism drowns. I haven’t read her novels, but the plot summaries similarly seem to lend themselves to skeptical interpretations. But then, how should grace manifest itself, if not through and beyond the manifold ways we attempt to debase and complicate its operations? This is, it seems to me, the central question O’Connor is trying to address. Like her, I am interested in this question – because I too am in need of grace. Which of us is not? 

16 Horsepower: the songs of David Eugene Edwards, writing for the band 16 Horsepower, seem to be sung from the point of view of a series of Flannery O’Connor characters. The initial temptation might be to assume some Nick Cave–like theatricality, but this documentary reveals something quite different. In it, Edwards talks about how the music of Joy Division and other post-punk bands felt to him like just as important a way to approach and apprehend the divine as the gospel traditions he grew up with. There is an important truth here: the divine is a terrible thing (in the original sense of that word also familiar to Williams and O’Connor). It has nothing to do with piety, still less with sentimentality.

The Exorcist: I like both the book and the film, although the latter is probably the stronger, more original work. For a work denounced by many as evil, The Exorcist is likely to strike first-time viewers as surprisingly conservative. Indeed, it is quite plausible to read it as a piece of celebratory propaganda on behalf of the Jesuit order – apart, perhaps, from its troubling ending, in which Father Karras, left alone after the more experienced Father Merrick has succumbed to a heart attack, and frustrated by his apparent failure to drive out the demon Pazuzu, invites it to leave Regan and enter him, and then commits suicide to prevent it taking him over. Needless to say, this conclusion is not consistent with the beliefs and practices of contemporary exorcists, researched by Blatty before writing the book. For them, the power of Christ is more than sufficient to defeat any demon – without any misguided and arrogant assumption of personal responsibility. But this plot development is a pretty clear demonstration of how the demands of approved theology and the demands of fictional dramatization might clash: Karras’s actions make perfect sense in dramatic terms. Troubled by doubts throughout the story, this is his final declaration of faith, in which he imitates Christ by sacrificing himself. Whether one is willing to accept this as a legitimate idea for the novel and film to propose depends on accepting that fiction and theology have different purposes. 

The Last Temptation of Christ: I only know the Scorsese film, not the source novel. This was of course the target of a sustained campaign of protest denouncing it as blasphemous upon its original release. The most frequently cited source of complaint was the climactic sequence in which Christ, on the cross, imagines a different fate for himself, in which he might have married Mary Magdalene and lived out a ‘normal’ life as a husband and father. This is the titular ‘Last Temptation’. But underlying this is the more troubling idea that, in the film, Jesus is not initially sure that he is the Son of God. Perhaps his call to take up this mantle is actually an act of outrageous presumption? Both these elements have no canonical justification in the Gospel texts. But they seem to me to be perfectly legitimate as fiction: as attempts to think through the meaning of incarnation. How exactly does God become man? Of course He must lay aside omnipotence. Is it really so outrageous to suppose that He lays aside omniscience as well? That just as He must struggle to overcome sin, He might also struggle to overcome doubt? There is nothing blasphemous in this. Unless fiction about God is in itself somehow blasphemous. 

Piss Christ by Andres Serrano: this is a work of art of quite astonishing notoriety. Over thirty years after its creation, it is still being cited with outrage as an example of everything that is wrong with modern art, and a reason why artists should not receive public funding. It is a sculpture – although it is generally represented and reproduced via a series of photographs taken by the artist, and I'm not sure it still exists in any other form – in which a cheap plastic crucifix is depicted immersed in urine. My thoughts on this are influenced by a Twitter thread, which I can’t find now, but which I paraphrase to some extent in what follows. This work, like The Last Temptation of Christ, is about incarnation. Obviously I’ve never given birth: nor have I even been present at a birth. But I do know it is a pretty messy and excruciating event, involving a lot of bodily substances beyond the rather neutral and untroublingly transparent amniotic fluid. And Christ, moreover, was born in a stable: not places typically known for their perfect cleanliness and freedom from bodily excreta. And when Christ died on the cross, do you think that didn’t involve involuntary body functions either? God chose to become man: to subject Himself to all this: to immerse Himself in all this. To insist that it did not compromise his godhood to be vulnerable in this way. A cheap plastic crucifix presents Christ’s body as smooth and integral, as sentimental and kitsch: not as violated and broken for us. Serrano’s work is about all this: about our bad faith in sanitising what incarnation means. But if you insist on seeing Piss Christ as blasphemous, I suspect you’ll read the climax of my novel in the same way. 

In that climax, I use a similar gambit to think about the relationship between abjection and transcendence: about abjection as a doorway to transcendence and the divine. In this I also follow O’Connor, and the medieval saints who kissed the sores of lepers as a way to approach God. And I follow Dante, for whom the way to heaven led through hell: down, down, all the way to the very bottom before beginning the painful ascent back up Mount Purgatory.

Inspirations: William Blake

When I pitched the idea of an 'illuminated novel' to Erica Wagner of Allen & Unwin in late 2008, I used the example of William Blake's 'illuminated books' as a historical precedent: editions of Blake's poetry, in which the words were incised calligraphically on engraving plates, where they were accompanied by Blake's own illustrations. In many cases, the printed copies were also painted by hand afterwards in watercolour. However, when Dan and I were working together to create Five Wounds, I found Blake's illustrations for Dante's The Divine Comedy and The Book of Job more useful, perhaps because these raise the issue of collaboration and interpretation more explicitly, but also because (to be honest) I find much of Blake's own poetry unreadable.

The following are from the illustrations for Dante's The Divine Comedy. The first is Dante running from the three beasts (the Leopard, Lion, and She-Wolf respectively from the bottom up); the second is the Wood of the Suicides:

The following are from Blake's illustrations for The Book of Job. The first is Behemoth and Leviathan; the second is the original watercolour of the same on which the engraving is based; the third is Job's Despair; the fourth is The Lord Answering Job out of the Whirlwind:

We did consider framing the Plates in Five Wounds in a similar manner to the way that these engravings for the Book of Job have been surrounded with text, but in the end we felt that it might have been too much in the context of the novel. It is, however, an idea I intend to return to.

Inspirations: The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

“[I]f one is to read Dante, and understand him, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours”. 

Donna Tartt, The Secret History, p. 184

“He thou dost gaze on, pierced by the triple stake, Counselled the Pharisees ’twas expedient One man should suffer for the people’s sake.

Naked, transverse, barring the road’s extent, He lies; and all who pass, with all their load Must tread him down; such is his punishment.

In this same ditch lie stretched in this same mode His father-in-law, and all the Sanhedrin Whose counsel sowed for the Jews the seed of blood.”

Then I saw Virgil stand and marvel at him Thus racked for ever on the shameful cross In the everlasting exile.

Dante, Hell, canto 23, lines 115-26, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers

I read Dante as an undergraduate, in the Penguin translation by Dorothy L. Sayers, who is better known as the writer of a series of detective novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, but was also an accomplished scholar. She not only translated Dante for the Penguin Classics series, but also the early-medieval French chanson, The Song of Roland.

The Sayers translation of Dante is aggressively odd, because, rather than writing in idiomatic English, she used conscious archaisms. It’s not quite cod-Shakespearian, but ‘dost’ and ‘twas’ were verging on the ridiculous even in 1949, when ‘Hell’ (as the first volume was bluntly translated) was first published. The odd locutions were further exaggerated by tortuous syntax, which was the result of Sayers’ ambitious (some would say foolhardy) decision to retain the terza rima structure and stress patterns of the original verse as far as was possible in English.

Terza rima is an Italian verse form of great elegance, which uses the rhyme scheme ABA BCB CDC DED etc. I always think of this interlocking structure in visual terms as being like a dovetail joint in woodwork. Rhymes are ubiquitous in Italian poetry, which is one of the reasons why English poets have always felt obliged to use them, i.e. because of the influence of Italian models like the sonnet, and in spite of native Anglo-Saxon precedents that were instead based on alliteration and assonance, but – for technical reasons it would be tedious to explain here – it is actually much more difficult to find rhymes in English than it is in Italian. In an epic work like Dante's, this is a serious problem, and one that becomes progressively more difficult for a translator to resolve satisfactorily.

Thus Sayers’ sets herself an impossible task, in the pursuit of which she frequently ties herself up in lexical knots, but, even so, I find her translation more compelling than most of the modern editions, which abandon the attempt and therefore inevitably render the verse as elevated prose. Sayers’ translation instead treats the text as something alien, something fundamentally other, that can only be expressed in English via a series of violent and artificial transformations (a pity she never had a go at Ovid). Some of it is truly risible, like her decision to render the sections of Provencal dialect as Scots brogue, but even there, you have to admire her chutzpah.

The crowning glory of the Sayers translation is not, however, the verse itself, but the extensive commentary, which takes up as much space as the poetry. Sayers has a great advantage over other editions here, in that she was a committed Christian who took all the theology very seriously, as, if not necessarily the literal truth, then certainly an essential truth, which is inseparable from the allegorical cast of mind that informs The Divine Comedy. In the Introduction to Hell, Sayers quotes Dante’s own explanation of allegorical interpretation.

The meaning of this work [The Divine Comedy] is not simple ... for we obtain one meaning from the letter of it, and another from that which the letter signifies; and the first is called literal, but the other allegorical or mystical. And to make this matter of treatment clearer, it may be studied in the verse: “When Israel came out of Egypt and the House of Jacob from among a strange people, Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion”. For if we regard the letter alone, what is set before us is the exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt in the days of Moses; if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral sense, we are shown the conversion of the soul from the grief and wretchedness of sin to the state of grace; if the anagogical, we are shown the departure of the holy soul from the thraldom of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory. And although these mystical meanings are called by various names, they may all be called in general allegorical, since they differ from the literal and historical.

The subject of the whole work, then, taken merely in the literal sense is “the state of the soul after death straightforwardly affirmed”, for the development of the whole work hinges on and about that. But if, indeed, the work is taken allegorically, its subject is: “Man, as by good or ill deserts, in the exercise of his free choice, he becomes liable to rewarding or punishing Justice”  

(quoted in Hell, ‘Introduction’, pp. 14-15).

(The last term in this schema, ‘analogical’, means using the literal event to figure a spiritual reality, or sometimes more specifically a truth relating to the fate of the soul after death.)

In the 1949 Penguin edition, the translation and the commentary are two sides of the same effort of interpretation, in which re-enactment is both the enabling technique and the goal, an endeavour to which Sayers is willing to commit herself, because, for the most part, she shares (or believes herself to share) Dante’s presuppositions and beliefs.

Sayers applies Dante’s four-part interpretative schema to the passage quoted above, which describes the fate meted out in hell to Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest who decided to seek Christ’s execution, who is crucified eternally (the same punishment he wished upon Christ). He is also laid on the ground to be trod underfoot by the Hypocrites, whose step is heavy indeed, since they are all wearing lead cloaks. (Such efficiency is common in the moral economy of Hell, where, for example, the Profligates run through the Wood of the Suicides, pursued eternally by black dogs, and in fleeing, they tear the branches from the bleeding trees in which the souls of the Suicides are imprisoned.) With regard to Caiaphas, Sayers explains:

This image lends itself peculiarly well to Dante’s fourfold system of interpretation ... (1) Literal: the punishment of Caiaphas after death; (2) Allegorical: the condition of the Jews in this world, being identified with the Image they rejected and the suffering they inflicted – “crucified for ever in the eternal exile”; (3) Moral: the condition in this life of the man who sacrifices his inner truth to expediency (e.g. his true vocation to money-making, or his true love to a political alliance), and to whom the rejected good becomes at once a heaven from which he is exiled and a rack on which he suffers; (4) Anagogical: the state, here and hereafter, of the soul which rejects God, and which can know God only as wrath and terror, while at the same time it suffers the agony of eternal separation from God, who is its only true good (Hell, p. 217).

I have only read through The Divine Comedy once, and only in Sayers’ translation (although I can at least claim to have read all of it, i.e. I did struggle through the Purgatory and Paradise after Hell). Several passages and images from it have remained with me, but, with all due respect to Dante, it is through the force of Sayers’ imagination that his original lives for me. It is the relationship between the translation and the commentary that is truly compelling. It is her effort to understand, and to communicate that understanding, which moves me as much as anything in the poem itself.

Sayers’ relationship with Dante is therefore quite different to the relationship between Eric Newton and Tintoretto, as I described it in a recent post. She proves that it is possible to collaborate with someone who has been dead for hundreds of years (something I also tried to do in Pistols! Treason! Murder!). As a postscript, I might also mention two artistic ‘collaborations’ with Dante: the first is a series of watercolours by William Blake, to which I may dedicate a subsequent post; the second is another edition of the Inferno, now long since out of print, which was both translated and illustrated by the artist Tom Phillips, whose work in A Humument is also an important precedent for some of the features of Five Wounds.

Inspirations: Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury (1963)

'Heck,' said Jim.

'No such place as Heck. But hell's right here under 'A' for Alighieri'.

'Allegory's beyond me', said Jim.

'How stupid of me,' Dad laughed. 'I mean Dante. Look at this. Pictures by Mister Dore, showing all the aspects. Hell never looked better. Here's souls sunk to their gills in slime. There's someone upside down, wrong side out'.

'Boy howdy!' Jim eyed the pages two different ways and thumbed on. 'Got any dinosaur pictures?'

UPDATE: Hello to visitors from raybradburyboard.com. I first read Something Wicked This Way Comes when I was 13 or so - about the same age as its protagonists Will and Jim - and my paperback is a very yellow copy of the tie-in edition from the (rather disappointing) film version of 1983, although I had already read a library copy several months before buying it, appropriately enough, given that Will's father is a librarian, and the town library is the setting for a crucial scene. It is one of only two books from my teen years that I read through a second time immediately upon finishing it (the other one will be the subject of a subsequent post). I remember being particularly delighted by the one sentence chapter 'Nothing much happened all the rest of that night' (which I quote from memory, so I may have got it wrong). Fahrenheit 451 also made a big impression on me, and, although I have never been a big short story fan, I read several volumes of Ray's short fiction on the basis of my enjoyment of the novels.

In addition, the quotation above may be the first place I ever came across the name 'Dante'.