Nikolai TolstoyRecensioni

Merlin's spirit is raised and tells long tale of battles and Irish myth

Not Malory's Arthurian legendary, but rather the Welsh underpinnings of the same. An acquired taste, but one that rewards the patient reader who can appreciate it on its own terms. Alas for the trilogy that might have been, but Tolstoy's devastating loss in a British libel suit ended what promised to be a unique take on the Arthurian mythos.

This was a terrible, rambling book.

So far, this is totally insane in the best possible way.

The medieval French interpreters of the Matter of Britain drew heavily upon the Celtic myths and folktales of Brittany and Great Britain when they wrote their own chivalric stories. The heroes of those earlier tales were seen by the French as uncouth and unchristian and they generally cast the native heroes as boorish and unmannered when compared with the "new" cultured French heroes.

Tolstoy has taken back the original traditions and shows these characters, warts and all, as people set within their own culture. Based on Welsh and Germanic mythology, the manners and mores might not be what we have come to expect from Arthurian heroes, but the combination of earthy humour and high mysticism strikes a chord of realism, despite the fantasy setting. The kings and warriors aren't paragons of chivalric virtue, but then they pre-date the chivalric ideal and demand to be treated on their own terms.

It's such a shame that Tolstoy's legal difficulties at the time of the publication of this first volume in an intended trilogy prevented him from continuing the series.

One of the few things about Patrick O'Brian everyone agrees on is that he was an intensely private person, who would have hated the idea of a biography. So now he has two. The first, by the American naval fiction buff Dean King (2000), was heavily based on interviews with O'Brian's son by his first marriage, Richard. Having declined to co-operate with King, O'Brian's stepson, Nikolai Tolstoy, published his own account of his stepfather's early years (2004) essentially as a riposte to King's "many errors".

Obviously, not many readers will really want to get involved in a squalid fight between two children still busily slinging mud sixty years after their parents' divorces, so there's no need to go into all the questions of who slept with whom when, or who paid or didn't pay their maintenance. We all know how vindictive even the nicest people can be when they're talking about their exes. I don't think it really changes our appreciation of O'Brian as a novelist either way.

There are some more pertinent differences, though: King is very good when he's discussing O'Brian's naval fiction, a subject that Tolstoy's book scarcely touches (presumably it will be in Volume 2, if and when). Tolstoy on the other hand has the advantage of access to many of O'Brian's private papers, and of knowing O'Brian very well (although they did not meet during the period covered by this book). He can speak authoritatively in places where King is just guessing. However, both rely heavily on finding autobiographical elements in O'Brian's fiction. Tolstoy is a rather better writer than King, and has the advantage of going second where King can't answer back. Unlike King, he also has the rare habit of proofreading his text (or has a competent editor), so his book is an altogether more agreeable experience for the reader than King's.

Some of Tolstoy's psychological speculation is probably every bit as fanciful as King's, but there are some things that ring true: his suggestion that O'Brian's difficult relationship with his father (more difficult in Tolstoy than in King) was at the root of his touchy personality and anxiety about social class is very telling. He probably over-rates the latter, though: in mid-20th century England, the only people who didn't suffer from some sort of class anxiety were either public-school-types like Tolstoy or manual workers. The idea that O'Brian got his image of leadership and command from the Master of the Ynysfor fox-hunt is interesting, too. Certainly more plausible than the spell on a mythical windjammer or the putative secret service behind enemy lines that King puts forward.

Ultimately, I think dazzyj is probably right that trying to make sense of O'Brian through biography is pretty futile. Even in Tolstoy's account, there's just so much we will never know. Better to read the novels again. If you do read either biography, you should probably read the other as well, otherwise you will end up with a rather distorted view.½

Good accounting of how brutal Stalin was and how right Germany may have been to invade Russia. Particularly interesting to learn how inept British and American diplomats trully were then, and most likely are now.

A brave but ultimately doomed attempt to describe O'Brian's early years in such a way as to explain what he became. Written by a step-son biased in the subject's favour, the book adds some centrally important details to the still-sketchy story of the novelist's early life, most crucially the fact that he left his first wife because of the affair he was already conducting with his soon-to be second wife (the author's mother, Mary). But Tolstoi's account relies too heavily on speculation based on O'Brian's fiction, and in the end calls to be skimmed through to get to the nub of what it has to say.

This book is intriguing for anyone with some background knowledge of the Eastern Front during WWII or who is interested in the fate of White Russians following the Russian Revolution. Following WWII, the nations of the world were desperate to find order again, and in their speedy haste towards peace, the innocent sometimes got swept away. This book details the repatriation of White Russians back to the the land they fled and to certain death, all as part of the policy of returning people to their respective countries. I would not recommend this book to anyone without some background knowledge, but interested parties will be fascinated by the events as they sadly unfold, even on American soil. I highly recommend this to historians and students for the rare perspective on this overlooked subject.

Fiction, Fantasy, Celtic legend, Merlin and King Maelgun, First published by Bantam Dell Pub Group, 1988, First Italian edition titled: "Merlino e il regno incantato", Rusconi, 1992, 756 pp., translated by Maria Grazia Griffini, Narrativa pesante e poco scorrevole, molto difficile arrivare alla fine½

NF/NF