Stay

by John Clute

Genres: Literary Fiction; Magical Realism; Science Fiction

Synopsis

Stay gathers together 100,000 words of reviews, plus short fiction by John Clute, and was originally published to coincide with Loncon3 (the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention) at which he was one of the Guests of Honour. Also included is a complete reprint of the text of The Darkening Garden .

Release date: November 24, 2016

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

This room is full of elephants.

The elephant looming in the background of Part One of Stay is The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, with David Langford, editor emeritus Peter Nicholls and managing editor Graham Sleight, which has taken up most of my work time since 2006. The columns and reviews assembled here, which cover the period 2008-2014, as a whole provide skimpier coverage than hitherto, though I did get a chance to look at some highlights of the past half-decade. Stay is the fifth collection of this sort. Strokes (1988) offered reviews from between 1966 and 1986; Look at the Evidence (1996) covered 1987-1992; Scores (2003) covered 1993 to 2003; and Canary Fever (2009) stopped part way through 2008. The first sf review I ever did, of Philip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, was published in Toronto at the end of 1964, just after the release of that great novel: so Stay comes at the end of half a century of talk. Coral does this too.

Part Two rides on top of an elephantine mess of unwritten or botched stories, most of them way old now; the five assembled here, all previously published in anthologies, are as much of a Collected I’m ever likely to create.

The elephant in Part Three is the ghost torso of a revision of The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror from 2006; a recasting I did not undertake here; the 2006 text is reprinted without changes, though without the 33 full-page illustrations which made the original volume into a work of art in itself. Three circumstances finally persuaded me to leave the book alone.

One): The usefulness of Darkening Garden seems increasingly to lie in the fact that it comprises a compact and unitary take on aspects of its central argument - that Horror should be called Terror - and that tampering with the text could only muddle it (see Two below).

Two): As a writer inadequately trained in the industrial humanities, and one disinclined to mime what I cannot master (see comments below on pages 200-204), I’ve never had much impulse to domesticate a lifelong habit of loose divagation, a pattern of “thinking” that progresses through a literalization of passing metaphors, in much the way the writing of fiction (at least my fiction) seems to proceed. The result of all this can be a kind of autodidact oneirism (see page 7 below), with any individual term or concept likely to evolve over time into a clade of riffs where usage A breeds with usage B and usage B breeds with usage C, but usage C cannot breed with A. Some of the “usage A” conceits in The Darkening Garden have speciated widely since 2006: in some of the essays assembled in Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm (2011); in some of the later pieces assembled in Canary Fever (2009); in certain entries contributed to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction or SFE (online from 2011); and here in Stay. And staying is what they should do.

Three): I only happened upon the term fantastika on a visit to the Czech Republic in 2007, a year after The Darkening Garden was published, but would have been highly tempted to retrofit it wherever possible into that text, if this could be done without damage (it could not).

The word fantastika comes from Continental criticism and general usage, and at its least hortatory can be used as a generalized umbrella designation for the literatures of the fantastic in the Western world. In the sense that it takes its incipit from a particular historical moment in that world, the term is perhaps best thought of as local to that world. I try to keep my own use of the term consistent with the following four conditions.

One): That fantastika describes those fictional works which are generically understood to be fantastic.

Two): That the term applies to works mostly composed after (say) M Volney’s The Ruins (1791), when it becomes possible to claim the planet itself as home territory; that it applies to works whose gaze at least theoretically addresses the fate of the world, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). An SFE entry on Ruins and Futurity argues a case for Volney’s text as an opening of the gate.

Three): That the default reading of a tale of fantastika is literal not metaphorical; that metaphors are understood in terms of the world, not vice versa. The term does not therefore describe pre-1800 tales featuring external marvels, like Fantastic Voyages from Lucian on, or Land of Fable fantasies like the Arabian Nights as translated/transmogrified by French writers in the early eighteenth century. An easy exorbitance, and an explicit geographical distancing from the “real” world, marks tales of this sort as exercises in metaphor, no matter how salutary. Fantastika is a grammar of the world; it is not a lesson imparted from without.

Four): That if we take the Western World between 1800 and 2014 as its initiating focus, then fantastika is transgressive against owners. On the other hand, if we take the world in its entirety as focus - a task whose magnitude I fall way short of competence even to assess - then the planetary gaze of fantastika can be seen as colonizing, and its transgressiveness is provincial. But this is perhaps to blame the tool for its user.

As with previous collections of columns and reviews, I’ve felt free to make clarifications throughout Part One, while attempting not to import hindsight. Where a later thought has come to mind, or when a particularly dumb utterance merits an apology, anything I say [HAS BEEN PUT IN ITALIC SMALL CAPS BETWEEN SQUARE BRACKETS AND DATED 2014]. A prefatory note to Part Two (page 229) explains briefly what was done to the stories there (usually nothing). As I said a moment ago, The Darkening Garden, which occupies the whole of Part Three, has not been tampered with.

Early versions of 28 pieces in Part One first appeared in Strange Horizons, as part of a roving column I’ve been calling Scores. I would particularly like to thank Niall Harrison for his friendship and his good editing.

Look at the Evidence was dedicated to Helen Nicholls. She died this year, and I would like to renew that dedication to her memory. Judith Clute read the manuscript as always and said Yes or No and did the cover. Liz Hand, to whom Stay is dedicated with love abiding, told me where to get on and where to get off, as always. Roger Robinson took the manuscript and the cover and the add-ons and made them stay. Leigh Kennedy made the index as much fun to read as the book hopes to be. The title is a theory, the title is prayer. Hwæt!

John Clute,

Maine, 28 May 2014

~~ original publication in SyFy Weekly untraced ~~

Gwyneth Jones ~ Spirit; Or, the Princess of Bois Dormant

~~ Gollancz, 2008 ~~

There was once upon a a story that had not been told, so it was told. After it was told a second time, Anxiety entered the world. Even as it was being told for the third time, funeral weeds from the Cauldron of Story covered its face. Winter came, weeds hardened into bars, and when the story was recited yet again, from a dais, it had become patriotism. Arrividerci, mute Neanderthal! You had nothing to lie about, you had nothing but an unserrated tongue to voice your need for children with, how could you dream of owning the future?

But these are deep waters, peopled with autodidact oneirisms, and it may be enough here to suggest that negotiations between the Twice-Told (or Megatext) and the new in any sf novel written in 2008 are time-honoured, and that, in these latter days of the genres whose weeds have entangled us so long, the task of tracing plays between Pre-Echo and Novum may comprise the main pleasure that text affords. In fantastika today the Shock of the New and the Shock of Recognition are twins under the skin. Even seven years ago, at the very moment of greatest shock, I think most of us understood that the shock we were experiencing in the hours of 9/11 was not surprise but recognition.

The problem with Jones’s new novel, Spirit; Or, the Princess of Bois Dormant, certainly does not lie, therefore, in the fact that she has chosen to inhabit the deep gossip of megatext, for she had no more choice than any of us; or even that the ghost within must (we think) have been meant to be visible, and that Spirit may comprise a deliberate attempt to trump the Count within by exposing him: an increasingly common strategy in writers dealing with our Late Culture. It may be though that her text was intended to be apprehended neat, and was not in fact designed to tease us with echoes – though Gollancz has blown any possible deferral strategy she might have hope to carry off, as its jacket copy states specifically that “Spirit is a high-octane re-telling of The Count of Monte Cristo”.

How long the unprompted reader might have taken to winkle out the original tale inside Spirit is hard to say (Jones does not in fact imprison her heroine unjustly until halfway through the long tale); but even when we are prompted, the complexities of the interaction between Jones’s planetary romance and Alexandre Dumas’s quite astonishing tale of revenge are far more intricate than I (not a recent reader of Monte Cristo, though a devoted one last time I read it in its entirety) could begin to master. Some links are as clear as the Chateau d’If; some as contortedly wreathed in plot fog as the family romance that corrodes the heart out of the Yu/Scolari clan that dominates great tracts of Spirit, a romance that certainly reflects, with more adhesive precision than I could entirely grasp, the intricate story of the Villefort family in Dumas’s original: right down to the morally compromised ancien-regime general who, now paralyzed with a stroke, still manages just before his demise to mastermind the unveiling of a lost document that exposes the true perpetrators of a long-ago crime against the heroine, and therefore saves the bacon of an innocent Scolari daughter about to be sacrificially inducted into a forced marriage.

As I’ve said “heroine” a couple of times, some synopsis might be useful. We are in a pre-existing Jones universe, some time after the Gender Wars closed off the last volume of her Aleutian Trilogy, which comprises White Queen (1991), The North Wind (1994) and Phoenix Cafe (1997). The backstory provided by the series is helpful if one cares to make much sense of the long history of internecine politicking that still ravages the era Spirit is set in, though it is dauntingly complex – I could taste some assonances with the history of France 1817-1834 or so, but then maybe it’s just that all unhappy families are alike – and it might be prudent to ignore it as much as possible. Certainly the Gollancz blurb, so refreshingly open about the Monte Cristo connection Jones went to some pains to conceal, is mum about the chains that bind Spirit to the previous series, which was in fact originally published by Gollancz (go figure why they didn’t mention it here); and maybe we should follow Gollancz’s lead. But we can’t entirely.

In the first trilogy, Earth is invaded by the Aleutians, an alien species Jones described in great and fascinating detail; most of them have since departed, leaving Blue Earth a minor but slowly waxing force in the interstellar culture whose control point is the artifact known as Speranza, where the latter portions of Spirit take place. What we need to know about the Aleutians now is that they abhor nonliving electronics and have mastered biological interfaces with what we think of as the electronic world; and that individual Aleutians are immortal rather in the way a genre of the fantastic is immortal: the spiritus mundi (as it were) of a dead Aleutian becomes a kind of megatext only recognizeable by its intimate biological descendent: an essentially soulless corpus whose main function is to recoup that megatext through a profound assimilative act of Recognition. The unfolding of this process in Spirit has nothing in common with Monte Cristo as far as I could figure, and takes most of the book to come into focus, though we are given some early signals that something like this is going to happen; but whether or not the life and death and reborning and Recogniton of Francis the Aleutian has anything to do with Monte Cristo, it is perhaps the most gripping aspect of the novel as a whole. Over the first half of Spirit – where the spirit of Dumas was least manifest to this reader – Francis dominates the tale, acting as the mysterious savant/advisor to the yet-only-ostensible heroine’s Mistress, Lady Nef, and also as Nef’s lover. He is an unguent for the telling, an enabler (I’d have liked him to be the ghost of Alexandre Dumas, but couldn’t work the trick). We come finally to Edmond Dantès.

And to the main fissure that divides Spirit from old substance. In Dumas’s novel, Dantès is a full-grown man, a young seafarer due for promotion to captain who returns to Marseille to marry his childhood sweetheart. For various reasons he is shanghaied by the law on his wedding day and incarcerated in the Chateau d’If, where after years of tortured immurement he meets the Abbé Faria, who applies his worldly wisdom to the desperate Dantès’s case, asking qui bono? and exposing for him the identity and motives of his betrayers. Over the following years, Faria teaches him all his wisdom, and on his deathbed tells him of a vast treasure secreted in a cave on the island of Monte Cristo. Dantès escapes in Faria’s shroud (how’s that for taking advantage of the anxiety of influence), gains the treasure, becomes the Count, and creates a vast spiderweb in whose strands his unspeakable betrayers gradually entrap themselves. En passant, Monte Cristo becomes philanthropically involved with various offspring of the villains, both using them to force their parents into the open, and saving them. Monte Cristo has undergone a metamorphosis in prison, from which he emerges almost supernaturally agile, learned, sensitive, with a secret identity, and in Mephistopheles gear [SEE MY “NOTES ON AN EARLY MODEL FOR SUPERMAN”, PARDON THIS INTRUSION, PP171-178 2014]. We follow his every move. Although his initial goal – it is the plot engine that drives Monte Cristo – is just revenge, we soon begin to guess that his ultimate goal as hero – in common with any of Dumas’s swashbuckler protagonists – is to defend society. Batman would be nowhere without Edmond Dantès.

In Spirit, our ultimate protagonist young Gwibiwr – luckily Jones calls her Bibi until she begins to call her the Princess of Bois Dormant – is a child of rebels uplifted into posh servitude by the mysterious Lady Nef, wife of General Yu (the ancient stroke victim who saves the bacon at the end of the book). Bibi grows up slowly in the complex effluvial City where the Nef/Yu household harbours itself. Like many teenage girls in Young Adult novels, she gains considerable knowledge while eavesdropping [SEE REVIEW OF KARL SCHROEDER’S LOCKSTEP FROM 2014 BELOW 2014]. She becomes a young woman and follows her mistress and Yu on a diplomatic mission to another planet. The mission goes savagely wrong. She is locked into a forced marriage with a distempered princeling (he soon leaves the story by dying). She is then imprisoned, for no reason she can fathom: eventually she discovers that Yu has betrayed his own wife, in the course of a centuries-old battle for power on Earth I have no intention of pretending I understood, and that it is to keep her quiet just in case Bibi knows something incriminating that she has been cast into (as it were) the Chateau d’If.

It is here Bibi eventually finds the similarly imprisoned Lady Nef, who becomes her Faria; and the rest of the novel – we are now better than halfway through – unpacks with some speed, though its gait is intermittently fettered by long passages of chillingly unidiomatic interactive chat on the part of sideline characters who seem to be in the novel for no other purpose than this. (Jones is almost always at her best dealing with one character at a time; she is curiously inept in her attempts to represent the interplays of the tacit and the explicit in the communication rituals that people normally engage in together: which may explain the large number of pinball scenes in Spirit, arenas of discourse crammed with aspergerish utterands who carom off each other deafly, emitting en passant What They Have To Say in fatally audible monotones.) The mysterious Princess of Bois Dormant - Bois Dormant being the Monte Cristo-like uninhabited planet Nef/Faria has bequeathed to Bibi - appears intermittently, in a grey-gown costume, pulling the strings of the plot. After spending half the novel inside her head, we are now exiled from Bibi as Princess, seeing her almost exclusively as an agent of megatext, bamboozling evildoers, defending society, ensuring the Spirit ends in a slew of marriages.

But The Count of Monte Cristo is a novel about a natural participant hero of the world who has been cheated of his just domain, and who recaptures his place in the sun of France by transforming himself into a saviour-figure one step shy of Ubermensch; and Spirit is about a natural world-refuser, a child and adolescent whose response to savage abuse is to decline any sweets on offer, and who transforms herself off-stage (as does Dantès) into a heroine so deeply recessed from the reader’s grasp that it is pretty well impossible to apprehend the kinetic reality of anything she does.

This may simply reflect a familiar response to the anxiety of influence. Or not.

Some considerable argument seems to govern the talk that fills so much of Spirit, much of it involving Nef and/or Francois and/or Bibi; but the premises underlying some of the sterner utterances are sunk deep in the mulch of Jones’s own previous volumes in the overall series; and this I cannot unpack safely. It may be taken, however, that the sense that Spirit is summatory has almost certainly been earned; and that a re-reading of the novel, and probably of its predecessors, will make Lady Nef’s final words of wisdom seem even more pointed than they do out of context:

“Ah, my people”, sighed Nef, tugging at her skinny braid, and grinning with her few [remaining] teeth. “Those Traditionalists! They must win, they always win. And after each crushing triumph, their territory is a little smaller.”

Over and above their seeming contextualizing of Bois Dormant’s efforts to sustain a just world, passages like this do seem to hint at a conversation between this series and Iain M Banks’s Culture books (certainly Jonesian coinings like S’na’ulat’tz and S’n’l’t”tz and Yelaixiang Konroe-Hosokawa are dreadfully similar to typical Banksian monikers, nor are they delivered with a smile, for Jones is not much of a smiler). But all of this does give comfort.

Only when we return to the elephant-in-the-room megatext does unease strike again. It is, I think, a dis-ease that it is possible to detect the book itself displaying. I think Jones does fail to keep Bibi properly alive throughout these long pages; and I think her failure to animate Bibi as Princess of Bois Dormant - a name which is a carillon of megatext - derives from something very much like embarrassment: as though she had realized too late that Dumas’s novel became gauche as soon as it left prison. The passages describing Bibi’s immurement have a cleansing, forwept intenstity, as though they had been scribed onto the page with a Clerk’s devotedness; and I think Jones was happiest there. But the heart of The Count of Monte Cristo lies in the saltatory grammar of release. It is not good news that a novel called Spirit prefers the Chateau d’If.

~~ Strange Horizons, 15 December 2008 ~~

Jo Walton ~ Half a Crown

~~ Tor, 2008 ~~

There is not much point pretending we were fooled. The first two volumes of Jo Walton’s alternate-world Hitler-Wins Small Change trilogy - Farthing (2006) and Ha’penny (2007) - took advantage of some moderately complex gaming with the codes of genre to give narrative juice to an extremely clear-hued but simplistic portrayal of an alternate 1949 Britain, eight years after a fascistic junta (in democratic sheep’s clothing) has come to terms, via Rudolf Hess, with Nazi Germany in 1941. So these volumes deal with grim matters - a scapegoating anti-Semitism only marginally less savage than that imposed on the Continent; privilege (indeed full citizenship) restricted to the well-born or -connected; a seemingly hysterical marginalizing of homosexuals and other degenerate classes whose effect (after we begin to realize that none of the gay characters who occupy much of the foreground of these tales have in fact had their lives or careers mutilated) is primarily to generate a culture-wide sense of low-level intimidation - but they deal with these matters with a light touch. This may be an intended consequence of the fact that comfortingly familiar genres are homaged throughout the telling of the two; or it may be something deeper, or more obscure, or even more threatening.

So we should not have been fooled. The first two volumes of Small Change have already skated over the meniscus of the horror of the world in a state of something approaching good cheer. Nothing in these two instalments hints that its readers were expected to treat as challenging or problematic the presto-chango strangeness underlying Walton’s clockwork tapestry: the sudden overwhelming triumph of a political system that excludes from effective power or participation not only the working classes and designated scapegoat communities but also the vast middle of the nation, which is effectively invisible and mute throughout (see below); but more than that, a triumph so fixative that Walton’s new dystopian Britain hardens instantly without demur into pharaonic rigor mortis: between 1941 and 1949 - bar a gradual worsening of conditions for scapegoats - nothing changes, the engines of transformation that had wracked and given hope to the real Britain between (say) 1930 and 1950 are frozen shut, without a word to tell us how. Under the meniscus, then, utter nightmare: but no one notices. In neither of the first two instalments is there a countervailing voice to cry havoc, nor is there in fact a narrative location for such a voice: no coign and zeugma (see below) where the argument of dystopia can be aired. It is as though the sudden world of Small Change had been constructed by a swarm intelligence [I MAY HAVE BEEN THINKING OF PETER WATTS’S BLINDSIGHT HERE; THERE’S A REVIEW IN CANARY FEVER, P277-280 2014].

But a Little Night Synopsis might be useful before we see what happens in Half a Crown, where readers may be expecting Walton to break the silence. In the 1930s, as readers are assumed to understand, Britain did in fact harbour both overt and secret sympathizers with Adolf Hitler; and such a group might plausibly persuade the nation to seek an honourable accommodation with Germany, thus avoiding the intolerable lesion of another conflict as devastating as the 1914-1918 Great War, which had poisoned Europe. Walton also assumes rightly that sf readers will immediately identify the Rudolf Hess Jonbar Point: if Hess’s mission is taken seriously - as in one of the twin halves of Christopher Priest’s highly complex The Separation (2002) - then a not wholly contemptible peace might be brokered: Priest allows this by arguing that the Final Solution had not been put into operation in 1941, and that in any case the Allies had no real awareness that such an obscenity might be in the works. Walton’s conspirators, on the other hand, are perfectly comfortable with whatever Hitler might do to the Jews. Her proto-fascists, who are known as the Farthing Set after the country house where most of the action of the first novel takes place, seem more interested in controlling Parliament than they are in Hitler’s maggotty obsessions, though they are happy that he has indeed invaded Russia, which is full of Reds (Walton’s assumption that Hitler would slowly prevail in Russia because of the peace with Britain is not persuasive, but her interest does not really lie in speculations of this sort). The story begins.

Though its narrative structure is unusual, Farthing is in fact a classic detective tale, with a mysterious murder, a country house (Farthing itself), a cast of suspects, a canny detective and a couple less canny assistants. The leader of the Farthing Set, Sir James Thirkie himself, is on the verge of taking the Prime Ministership from the unstable leftist Anthony Eden, but is murdered in the night. Walton’s homaging intent is clear in general; if I were to pick in particular a predecessor that her tale had to measure itself against, it would be Michael Innes’s Hamlet, Revenge! (1937), a massively intricate mystery involving the death of a claimant to the Prime Ministership at a large country house where (as at Farthing) theatricals are mounted. Its great richness of language and scope - as well as a genuinely bewildering mystery which is triumphantly solved - do mark this novel off from the cheery thinness of Farthing’s mise en scene, where the banality of the actual crime featured (it is a sin against homage for Walton not to have tried harder to construct a genuine puzzle to unknot) adds to a sense that Farthing (unlike Innes’s intensely realized Scamnum Court) is a cartoon. (I believe Emma Tennant’s The Last of the Country House Murders (1974) has also been suggested as an earlier possible model, the main difficulty here being that Tennant - her dedication of the book to J G Ballard gives a clue - does a demolition derby job on the form she eats off.) Farthing does however give us some sense of an intimidated Britain, through backstory dumps and narrative snapshots; and it lays down a time-bomb important later on.

The tale is told in alternating chapters, each of almost exactly the same length. A third-person narrative follows Chief Inspector Carmichael, who is gay, as he investigates the murder; the first-person narrative strand features one of the Farthing family daughters, who very slowly realizes that her saintly Jewish husband is going to be scapegoated for the crime. Her voice is chatty, slightly faux-naif, incessant, stage-front. Carmichael solves the case: Thirkie’s murderer is fellow Farthing-Set member Mark Normanby (along with an unspecified cohort of collaborators); but Normanby, who is himself homosexual, threatens to expose Carmichael if he does not frame the Jew. (This moral and sexual architecture reminds one of Ian R. MacLeod’s The Summer Isles (2005), a more darkly conceived Hitler-Wins Britain in which a burnt-out-case homosexual ex-consigliere to Britain’s homosexual dictator prepares for death.) Carmichael submits to the blackmail, though he retains the incriminating evidence, and secretly arranges for the scapegoat and his wife to escape to Canada. Normanby rides a wave of sympathy into the Prime Ministership.

An aesthetic shock awaits us as we begin Ha’penny: because it almost looks as though we’ve started the same book again. Differences do soon emerge, though. Some months have passed. This time round the third-person chapters - which exude even more clearly and deliberately than before the brownish, guy ambience of police procedurals like John Creasey’s Gideon of the Yard tales - are modeled not on the detective novel but the political thriller; we meet Carmichael again, dealing this time with a plan to assassinate both Normanby and the visiting Hitler at a performance of Hamlet. The alternating first-person chapters are recounted in this second volume by a different young woman, though like Lucy in Farthing she exemplifies the role (or topos) of the naive young visitor-to-utopia who knows nothing of the world (though in this case she was born in it) and must be told. Viola Lark is an actress, one of the five notorious Larkin sisters (based on the Mitford clan in our world), star of the projected production of Hamlet, and she is coerced into joining the assassination attempt. Anguishedly, Carmichael foils the plot. It might be the case that Walton took Viola’s airhead sense of immunity from some character or characters in one of Nancy Mitford’s novels (but this is a surmise).

It is not a surprise, perhaps, to open Half a Crown, the final volume and climax of Small Change, and to find that the governessy stichomythia-effect that governs the first two volumes has been enforced once again. In fact, however, the reader may experience an initial small thrill at how daringly Walton exposes herself here: because a formal structure this adamant has to pay off, or its costs - the crazing cookiecut alternation of Matter and natter; and a real reluctance on the part of that reader to immerse herself for another long exposure to the mind of yet another airhead “female” rendered in terms that (had Small Change been written by a man) might have been seen as misogynist - could mount into the pyrrhic. So Walton is going to have to justify the use of this adamantly static structure to convey the portrait of a Britain stressed by now to the uttermost, as the Carmichael chapters of Half a Crown hint immediately is the case; she is going to have to show us that the paint-by-numbers structure of Small Change as a whole - and its suave but slavish devotion to storytelling models and tricks that seem increasingly deracinated as they multiply - does not unpack as some sort of game, as though she had bet with herself she could pull off a book about Nazi Britain without breaking step. With this apprehension in mind, it is not perhaps reassuring to remember that the first subtitle Walton suggests for the trilogy is Still Life with Fascists.

Half a Crown, it ha