Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

Snails really are the most interesting creatures. Geilston Bay, November 2010.

Two books read this week, and what a pair! I managed to complete parts two and three of the Lucifer Box trilogy. After reading The Vesuvius Club by Mark Gatiss a few weeks back, I leant of the library and score numbers two and three. # 2 is The Devil in Amber, and takes place twenty years after the Edwardian adventures of #1.

Lucifer is now middle aged, traumatised by the Great War, and under the pump from a new generation of secret agents. Of course, he remains as beautiful lithe as ever – and informs us on a regular basis – but seems a little less cocksure and a little more vulnerable than the earlier tale.

Without giving too much away, the story is a little darker as Lucifer battles a horrible gang of Fascists with a bent for Satanism. It is not quite the romp of the first, and the maudlin tone of the interwar period is well captured.

Finishing the set, we shoot forward another twenty-or-so years into a Cold War world very different from the earlier two stories. Perhaps this shift explains why Black Butterfly is the most Bond-like of all the novels.

Lucifer has now risen to the top of the ranks of the Secret Service, and is not shy off being retired. Of course, there remains one last adventure to be had. As expected, there is a sense of mortality that hangs over this one like a black cloud, but that does not stop our hero getting his end away on a regular basis. Despite the bisexual Box having at it with all sorts, this one is a played a little straighter than the previous two.

If you’re after a bit of light Christmas reading, and like your heroes a little different, you could do much worse than check these three out.

Comments

Kris McCracken said…

This one was nice.

17 December 2010 at 15:02

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

Theme Thursday again, and this one is rather easy. I am Tasmanian, you see, and aside from being all around general geniuses - as I have amply described previously - we are also very familiar with the concept of WATER. Tasmania is the ONLY island state of an ISLAND continent. That means, we're surrounded by WATER. That should help explain why I take so many photographs of water . Tasmania was for a long time the place where the British (an island race terrified of water) sent their poor people most vile and horrid criminals. The sort of folk who would face the stark choice of a death sentence , or transportation to the other end of the world. Their catalogue of crimes is horrifying : stealing bread assault stealing gentlemen's handkerchiefs drunken assault being poor affray ladies being overly friendly with gentlemen for money hitting people having a drink and a laugh public drunkenness being Irish Fenian terrorist activities being Catholic religious subversion. ...

This will hurt me...

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