My New Bookcase

Bibliography / Psychogeography Bookcase
[photographs by Bronwyn Lloyd (1/6/22)]

Bronwyn and I are inveterate vintage shoppers. The other day we were looking through the Hospice shop at Wairau Park (located just up the street from Hoyts Cinemas, enabling one to combine browsing with moviegoing in a very civilised fashion). In the past she's been a bit scornful of my tendency to return from such expeditions with a pile of scruffy old ex-library books, so I was quite surprised when she pointed out a handsome wooden bookcase in the middle of the shop.

Wairau Park Hospice Shop (2020)

Or, rather, there were two bookcases. One was so large and imposing that it was hard to imagine fitting it into our remaining free wallspace. However the other, smaller one had tall, wide, wooden shelves, and looked tailor-made to hold some exciting new category of books.

The last time an event of this type happened, I used the new space to centralise my previously disparate collection of ghost stories. This time I decided to tackle the tricky topic of psychogeography.

But what exactly is psychogeography? I suppose, in the final analysis, it mainly depends on the list of authors you choose to attach to the concept. I wrote some notes about it for one of our Massey postgraduate creative writing courses a few years ago, which I'll refer you to if you want to explore the theme in more depth. I'll content myself here with a brief précis:

Richard Edkins: The Flâneur, Psychogeography and Drift Photography (2015)

Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance — nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city — as one loses oneself in a forest — that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

- Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle (1932)

In many ways, psychogeography could be seen as a revival of French poet Charles Baudelaire's idea of the flâneur, the perambulating dandy, whose apparently aimless wanderings offer vital clues to the deeper meaning of modern urban environments.

Psychogeography continues to be associated principally with urban explorations - Peter Ackroyd's double-focus historical novel Hawksmoor (1985); Mike Davis's City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990); Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell (1989-99), which postulates a Masonic "secret history" behind the Jack the Ripper murders; and Iain Sinclair's explorations of London's mythic past and present in such works as Lights out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (1997) - even Chris Trotter's chapter about an idealised dream Auckland in his alternative history of New Zealand No Left Turn (2007).

However, in his more recent book the Edge of the Orison (2005), Sinclair has extended his methodology to cover the rural haunts of nineteenth-century English nature poet John Clare, setting out to retrace the poet's famous 'Journey out of Essex' - Clare's own prose account of his 1841 escape from the asylum in which he had been incarcerated to find his lost love, Mary Joyce (unfortunately already three years dead).

Psychogeography, then, deals principally with boundary-crossings: whether those boundaries are those of genre (verse, fiction, non-fictional prose) or discipline (history, geography, travel, memoir and biography).

I suppose, in essence, that it consists of imposing a theory (generally of an occult or abstruse nature) on a landscape, more or less arbitrarily. The landscape is then interrogated to see whether or not it matches up with or confirms the theory, no matter how - intentionally - absurd it may be.

Creative NZ grants (2020)

The list of notable psychogeographers included in Wikipedia's article on the subject includes the following names:

• Peter Ackroyd
• Michèle Bernstein
• Pat Barker
• Paul Conneally
• Guy Debord
• Stewart Home
• Jacqueline de Jong
• Robert Macfarlane
• Geoff Nicholson
• Iain Sinclair
• Laura Oldfield Ford
• Nick Papadimitriou
• Will Self
• Cathy Turner (artist)
• Jean Rolin
• Philippe Vasset

My own set of favourite psychogeographers is far shorter, though it does include a few of the same suspects:

1. Geoffrey Ashe (1923-2022)
2. John Clare (1793-1864)
3. Tim Powers (1952- )
4. W. G. Sebald (1944-2001)
5. Iain Sinclair (1943- )

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Geoffrey Ashe (2009)

Geoffrey Ashe
& the Arthurian Legend

Geoffrey Ashe actually died just a couple of months ago, on the 30th January 2022, at his home in Glastonbury. On my one and only visit there, in 1981, I was hugely impressed by the intense atmosphere projected by both the town and its environs. I had, admittedly, been reading John Cowper Powys' mammoth novel A Glastonbury Romance, and a combination of that and Geoffrey Ashe's King Arthur's Avalon made it seem like holy ground to me.

I remember dashing up Glastonbury Tor, and feeling as though the ghosts were springing out of the grass all around me. Until my father turned to make some banal remark, that is - God knows how he put up with such a sullen and pretentious teen! All I can say is that my siblings weren't much better. "Thanks for the interruption," as one of my older brothers remarked on a not dissimilar occasion.

The Arthurian legend could certainly be described as England's Dreaming (the title of Jon Savage's classic book about the Sex Pistols). There are rivals, of course: Robin Hood and his Merry Men, Langland's peasant hero Piers Plowman - but only King Arthur's aristocratic mythos combines all the different strands of Celtic, Roman, Saxon, and Norman culture into one bizarre cauldron of stories.

Here's a selection of some of the literature on the topic I've collected over the years. First, from Geoffrey Ashe's own eclectic bibliography (you can find out more about him from my blogpost on the subject):

1. King Arthur’s Avalon: The Story of Glastonbury. 1957. Fontana Books. London: Collins, 1973.
2. From Caesar to Arthur. London: Collins, 1960.
3. Land to the West: St Brendan’s Voyage to America. London: Collins, 1962.
4. All About King Arthur. 1969. London: Carousel Books, 1973.
5. Camelot and the Vision of Albion. 1971. St. Albans, Herts: Panther, 1975.
6. The Finger and the Moon. 1973. St. Albans, Herts: Panther, 1975.
7. The Virgin. 1976. Paladin. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1977.
8. The Ancient Wisdom. 1977. Abacus. London: Sphere Books, 1979.
9. Avalonian Quest. 1982. London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1984.
10. The Discovery of King Arthur. With Debrett’s Peerage. London: Guild Publishing, 1985.
11. The Landscape of King Arthur. With Photographs by Simon McBride. London: Webb & Bower (Publishers) Limited, in association with Michael Joseph Limited, 1987.
12. Mythology of the British Isles. 1990. London: Methuen London, 1992.

I've added a few other books to the bookcase to contextualise Ashe's curious imaginings. He was a strange combination of scholar and visionary, and - at least until the 'psychogeographer' label came along - it was hard to work out which of these aspects was the most dominant:

1. Alcock, Leslie. Arthur’s Britain: History and Archaeology, AD 367-634. 1971. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
2. Ashe, Geoffrey, ed. The Quest for Arthur’s Britain. With Leslie Alcock, C. A Ralegh Radford, & Philip Rahtz. 1968. London: Paladin, 1973.
3. Barber, Richard. Legends of King Arthur. The Boydell Press. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer Ltd., 2001.
4. Barber, Richard. The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend. 2004. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005.
5. Bord, Janet & Colin. Mysterious Britain. 1972. A Paladin Book. Frogmore, St Albans: Granada Publishing Ltd., 1975.
6. Chambers, E. K. Arthur of Britain. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1927.
7. Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. 1966. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
8. Gerald of Wales. The History and Topography of Ireland. Trans. John J. O’Meara. 1951. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
9. Cambrensis, Giraldus. The Itinerary through Wales and The Description of Wales. Trans. Sir Richard Colt Hoare. 1806. Introduction by W. Llewellyn Williams. 1908. Everyman’s Library. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., n.d.
10. Treharne, R. F. The Glastonbury Legends. 1967. Abacus. London: Sphere Books, Ltd., 1975.
11. Watkins, Alfred. The Old Straight Track. 1925. London: Abacus, 1976.
12. Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance. 1920. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957.

Joanna Gillan: Glastonbury Tor (2022)

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William Henry Hunt: Unknown Man (perhaps John Clare?) (1820s)

John Clare
& the Power of Pastoral

I've written a couple of posts about John Clare already. The first was an attempt to parallel his poetic practice with that of his near-contemporary Charles Baudelaire. The second was more narrowly focussed on the peculiarities of his bibliography.

He's one of those poets you either get or you don't. His 'madness' (i.e. inability to conform) has made him a troublesome figure for readers and literary scholars alike. In his lifetime his poems were normalised and repunctuated for him by his publisher. After his death the same service has been performed by a series of editors.

But then, the same could be said of almost all the poets of his era. Wordsworth himself punctuated oddly and sporadically, expecting his printers to deal with such accidentals. Even W. B. Yeats was notoriously vague about both spelling and 'stops'.

But Clare is in a class of his own. His output was vast and disorderly - especially the later poems from the asylum years. What makes him an appropriate figure to include here is the immense precision of his observation and knowledge of natural history. His landscapes and creatures are not the symbolic nightingales and skylarks of a Keats or a Shelley, but genuine living beings for whom he had both compassion and empathy.

Clare and Clare-iana have therefore become one of the touchstones of modern pastoral writing. And the story of his posthumous rediscovery and influence is almost as fascinating as the events of his own life:

1. The Works of John Clare. Ed. Arthur Symons. 1908. Introduction by John Goodridge. The Wordsworth Poetry Library. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1995.
2. The Poems of John Clare. Ed. J. W. Tibble. 2 vols. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1935.
3. Poems of John Clare’s Madness. Ed. Geoffrey Grigson. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949.
4. The Prose. Ed. J. W. & Anne Tibble. 1951. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
5. The Letters. Ed. J. W. & Anne Tibble. 1951. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
6. The Shepherd’s Calendar. Ed. Eric Robinson & Geoffrey Summerfield. Wood Engravings by David Gentleman. 1964. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.
7. The Later Poems. Ed. Eric Robinson & Geoffrey Summerfield. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964.
8. Selected Poems. Ed. J. W. & Anne Tibble. Everyman’s Library, 563. London: J. M. Dent, 1965.
9. The Wood is Sweet. Ed. David Powell. Introduction by Edmund Blunden. Illustrated by John O'Connor. Poems for Young Readers. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1966.
10. Bird Poems. Introduction by Peter Levi. Wood-Engravings by Thomas Bewick. London: The Folio Society, 1980.
11. John Clare’s Birds. Ed. Eric Robinson & Richard Fitter. Illustrated by Robert Gillmor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
12. John Clare: The Oxford Authors. Ed. Eric Robinson & David Powell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
13. The Parish: A Satire. Ed. Eric Robinson. Notes by David Powell. 1985. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
14. Selected Letters. Ed. Mark Storey. Oxford Letters & Memoirs. 1988. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
15. Selected Poems. Ed. Geoffrey Summerfield. 1990. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2000.
16. John Clare By Himself. Ed. Eric Robinson & David Powell. Wood Engravings by Jon Lawrence. 1996. Fyfield Books. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002.

For more on the subject, here are a few selections from the burgeoning library of books about him. I'd recommend, in particular, Jonathan Bate's groundbreaking biography:

1. Tibble, J. W. & Anne. John Clare: A Life. 1932. Rev. Anne Tibble. London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1972.
2. Storey, Edward. A Right to Song: The Life of John Clare. London: Methuen, 1982.
3. Bate, Jonathan. John Clare: A Biography. 2003. Picador. London: Pan Macmillan, 2004.
4. Foulds, Adam. The Quickening Maze. 2009. Vintage Books. London: Random House, 2010.
5. Felstiner, John. Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2009.

Rob Chapman: On the Trail of John Clare (2017)

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Tim Powers (2013)

Tim Powers
& the Time to Cast Away Stones

Tim Powers' novels and stories are definitely an enthusiasm of mine. They have their limitations, but their strengths are equally obvious. You'll have to take my word for it that it's not as easy as it might seem to concoct complex and believable secret histories, mixing occult and quotidian phenomena in approximately equal measure. I am, after all, the author of a number of them (my 'REM' trilogy, for instance). Powers is a master of the art.

I've discussed my favourites among his books in my blogpost here, though a few more have appeared since I wrote it: notably the Vickery and Castine trilogy, which does a great job of mythologising the Los Angeles Freeway system, among other strange and arcane matters.

Here's a list of his major works to date (give or take a few limited-edition novellas):

1. Powers of Two: The Skies Discrowned & An Epitaph in Rust. 1976, 1986, 1989. Framingham, MA: The NESFA Press, 2004.
2. The Drawing of the Dark. 1979. London: Granada, 1981.
3. The Anubis Gates. 1983. London: Triad Grafton Books, 1986.
4. Dinner at Deviant's Palace. 1985. London: Grafton Books, 1987.
5. On Stranger Tides. 1987. New York: Ace Books, 1988.
6. The Stress of Her Regard. 1989. London: HarperCollins, 1991.
7. Last Call. Fault Lines, 1. 1993. New York: Avon Books, 1996.
8. Expiration Date. Fault Lines, 2. London: HarperCollins, 1995.
9. Earthquake Weather. Fault Lines, 3. 1997. London: Orbit, 1998.
10. Declare. 2001. New York: HarperTorch, 2002.
11. Strange Itineraries and Other Stories. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2005.
12. Three Days to Never. 2006. William Morrow. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2013.
13. The Bible Repairman and Other Stories. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2011.
14. Hide Me Among the Graves. 2012. Corvus. London: Atlantic Books Ltd., 2013.
15. Medusa's Web. 2015. Corvus. London: Atlantic Books Ltd., 2016.
16. Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers. Preface by David Drake. Introduction by Tony Daniel. 2017. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2019.
17. Alternate Routes. Vickery & Castine, 1. A Baen Books Original. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2018.
18. Forced Perspectives. Vickery & Castine, 2. A Baen Books Original. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2020.
19. Stolen Skies. Vickery & Castine, 3. A Baen Books Original. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2022.

The critical literature on him is limited, consisting mainly of interviews and reviews in various journals. He isn't discussed directly in the K. K. Ruthven book cited below, but many of its contentions bear interestingly on his work:

1. [Katz, Brad. “An Interview with Tim Powers (21/2/96).” Brow Magazine 1996.
   http://www.mcs.net/~brow/powers.html]
2. Ruthven, K. K. Faking Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Karen Robinson: Los Angeles Freeway System Map (2013)

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Basso Cannarsa: W. G. Sebald (2019)

W. G. Sebald
& the Natural History of Destruction

W. G. Sebald is another one of those writers who seems unfairly singled out by fate for a brief flowering and then eternal night ("cum semel occidit brevis lux, / nox est perpetua una dormienda", [when once the brief light has set, / an eternal night must be slept], as Catullus put it in his much-quoted Elegy V). Hence, perhaps, the succession of books which has appeared since his death - perhaps in the hope of continuing his writing career from beyond the grave.

I've written more about this in my blogpost here, along with a few notes in a more recent post on The Imaginary Museum.

Is he a psychogeographer? It seems as good a description as any for his genre-defying works, part fiction, part non-fiction, part travel literature, part history lesson: in particular Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn, but also such eclectic essay collections as the recently translated A Place in the Country.

That's how I choose to regard him, at any rate, though I'm happy to hear all the reasons why I'm wrong from some more earnest commentator.

1. After Nature. 1988. Trans. Michael Hamburger. 2002. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
2. Vertigo. 1990. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Harvill Press, 1999.
3. The Emigrants. 1993. Trans. Michael Hulse. 1996. London: Vintage, 2002.
4. The Rings of Saturn. 1995. Trans. Michael Hulse. 1998. London: Vintage, 2002.
5. A Place in the Country: On Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Robert Walser and Others. 1998. Trans. Jo Catling. 2013. London: Penguin, 2014.
6. On the Natural History of Destruction: With Essays on Alfred Andersch, Jean Améry and Peter Weiss. 1999. Trans. Anthea Bell. 2003. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004.
7. Austerlitz. 2001. Trans. Anthea Bell. 2001. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002.
8. Campo Santo. Ed. Sven Meyer. 2003. Trans. Anthea Bell. 2005. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006.
9. [with Jan Peter Tripp]. Unrecounted: 33 Texts and 33 Etchings. 2003. Trans. Michael Hamburger. Hamish Hamilton. London: Penguin, 2004.
10. Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001. 2008. Trans. Iain Galbraith. Hamish Hamilton. London: Penguin, 2011.

Carol Angier's biography speaks to the underlying anxieties of Sebald's life and times, and the curious ways in which this manifested itself in his work. As in her previous book about Primo Levi, she does have certain hobby-horses which appear continually, but no-one could complain of any lack of contextual documentation for her views.

1. Angier, Carol. Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald. London: Bloomsbury Circus, 2021.

Barbara L Hui: Mapping Literature (2014)

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Iain Sinclair (2013)

Iain Sinclair
& the Secret History of London

Iain Sinclair is certainly the most self-consciously psychogeographical of all the authors mentioned here. He began as a poet, then moved to writing novels, and then on to stranger works of cross-genre travel / history / art & film criticism. It's mostly these latter which have won him a cult audience.

He may lack the immediate visibility of a Peter Ackroyd or an Alan Moore, but his oeuvre could be argued to be at least as influential. I haven't yet written about him at length, as there are a number of his books I'd like to read first, but I have compiled an approximate bibliography for him among the others included here

Here's a small selection from the poetry and fiction he's published to date:

1. Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge. 1975 & 1979. Introduction by Michael Moorcock. Vintage. London: Random House, 1995.
2. Flesh Eggs & Scalp Metal: Selected Poems, 1970-1987. A Paladin Paperback Original. London: Grafton Books, 1989.
3. Downriver (Or, The Vessels of Wrath): A Narrative in Twelve Tales. 1991. Vintage. London: Random House, 1995.
4. Radon Daughters. 1994. Vintage. London: Random House, 1995.
5. Dining on Stones (or, The Middle Ground). 2004. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005.

The non-fiction works listed below are where his greatest strengths lie, I would argue. Unfortunately I don't own a copy of his ground-breaking London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 (2002) but I have read it with great interest, and indeed used a chapter from it as one of the readings in my Massey Travel Writing course.

1. Lights Out for the Territories: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London. London: Granta Books, 1997.
2. Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's 'Journey Out of Essex'. 2005. London: Penguin, 2006.

Karen Robinson: On the Road (2004)

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Here and there on this blog you can find some of my own attempts at a psychogeography of my own whereabouts, in the form of the two (hopefully ongoing) series "The Intrepid Ghost-Hunters" and "The Mysteries of ...":

1. The Intrepid Ghost-Hunters (1): Waitomo Caves (13/11/2012)
2. The Intrepid Ghost-Hunters (2): Thames & Te Aroha (13/8/2013)
3. The Intrepid Ghost-Hunters (3): Home Turf (5/8/2015)
4. The Mysteries of Ashburton (25/1/2019)
5. The Mysteries of Rotorua (28/4/2019)
6. The Mysteries of Auckland: H. P. Lovecraft (12/4/2021)
7. The Mysteries of Auckland: Jules Verne (4/7/2021)

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In any case, it's nice to see all these books gathered together for the first time. I can feel them already starting to talk among themselves. I doubt very much that this is the last that I'll have to say on the topic, either.

Robert Macfarlane: Psychogeography (2019)

Why Tim Powers?

Tim Powers (1952- )

You know how it is when you have a long list of worthy books to read, and you find yourself instead obsessively following up every title by some hitherto neglected writer? True, I've been reading Tim Powers on and off for years, but this summer I found myself going through his entire oeuvre again in a rather more systematic way, book by book, rant by rant ...

Here's a list of my own collection of Powers books. It isn't quite complete, as there are a few missing novellas and limited editions - short story collections, mainly - but I have all fourteen of his novels, from The Skies Discrowned (1976) to Medusa's Web (2015).

1. Powers of Two: The Skies Discrowned & An Epitaph in Rust. 1976, 1986, 1989. Framingham, MA: The NESFA Press, 2004.
2. The Drawing of the Dark. 1979. London: Granada, 1981.
3. The Anubis Gates. 1983. London: Triad Grafton Books, 1986.
4. Dinner at Deviant's Palace. 1985. London: Grafton Books, 1987.
5. On Stranger Tides. 1987. New York: Ace Books, 1988.
6. The Stress of Her Regard. 1989. London: HarperCollins, 1991.
7. Last Call. Fault Lines, 1. 1993. New York: Avon Books, 1996.
8. Expiration Date. Fault Lines, 2. London: HarperCollins, 1995.
9. Earthquake Weather. Fault Lines, 3. 1997. London: Orbit, 1998.
10. Declare. 2001. New York: HarperTorch, 2002.
11. Strange Itineraries: Short Stories. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2005.
12. Three Days to Never. 2006. William Morrow. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2013.
13. Hide Me Among the Graves. 2012. Corvus. London: Atlantic Books Ltd., 2013.
14. Medusa's Web. 2015. Corvus. London: Atlantic Books Ltd., 2016.

So who on earth is Tim Powers, some of you must be saying by now? His work falls into the SF / Fantasy genre, certainly, but it's hard to be more precise than that - I've heard him described as a Steampunk writer, but I'm not sure that that label quite fits, either. He is, really, unique and sui generis.

Which is not to say that he's much of a prose stylist. One has to put up with some pretty clumsy phrasing at times, some clunky paragraphs - not to mention odd lapses of historical verisimilitude (and some truly dreadful attempts to translate bits of dialogue into foreign languages).

Guess what? It doesn't matter. Even though many admirers of Byron and Shelley would shudder to read what he's made of them in The Stress of Her Regard (for instance), or of Coleridge in The Anubis Gates, there's a mad exuberance about both books which keeps one reading on, and which ends up constructing a pretty plausible series of alternate universes largely controlled by magic and the hermetic sciences.

I once read an interview [Brad Katz, Brow Magazine (21/2/96)] with Powers where he said that he'd been much influenced by Fellini in his early writing. He liked the way that there's almost always something going on behind the main action in a Fellini film: a couple of extras trying to carry a church bell, a bunch of kids getting into a fight. He's been trying ever since, it seems, to get that effect in his fiction - a sense of teeming life going on behind his protagonists' mad preoccupations: to revive the dead Fisher King of Northern California, to stop a bunch of alien spiders from taking over the universe, to exterminate the rogue genies who've infested Noah's Ark ...

Tim Powers: Powers of Two (1976 / 2004)

This rather handsome hardback collects Powers' first two books, The Skies Discrowned and An Epitaph in Rust (both 1976). He writes in his entertaining 2003 introduction to this reprint:

the publication of these two books ... had effectively deflected me from wanting to be a college literature professor; I didn't go back to graduate school. ... if it weren't for K. W. Jeter and Roger Elwood, and the heady experience of seeing those first two books in print, It'd today be teaching "Twain to Modern," and "Analysis of Literary Forms," and maybe - with a wistful air, I like to think! - "Creative Writing."

Bravo, Tim! I like that "wistful air." As one who himself teaches Creative Writing (and various survey courses not a million miles from the ones described), I know what he's talking about. I remember once confessing to John Dolan how much I'd prefer to be a Sci-Fi pulp writer than any kind of "intellectual" or "experimental" writer. He stared back at me. "Of course!" he said. "If we only had the talent!"

Who wouldn't prefer to be Gene Wolfe than Virginia Woolf, or - in this case - a kind of maverick hybrid of pulp fiction, period pastiche and perverse historicism like Tim Powers rather than a staid old English lecturer? Never mind, we give what we can - the rest is the madness of art ...

The books themselves are promising but a little embryonic: with quite a lot of Jack Vance mixed into their basic substratum of Philip K. Dick.

Tim Powers: The Drawing of the Dark (1979)

This book gives us the first glimpse of Powers' protean, Fellini-esque self. Loaded with detail (much of it referred to glancingly, in passing), it takes us through pre-Enlightenment Europe to Vienna in 1485 during its siege by the Turks. Merlin and Arthur are the principal protagonists, though in their latter-day avatars Brian Duffy and "Aurelianus": the stakes are no less than the soul of Europe itself.

It's a break-neck, rollicking yarn, and very entertaining to read, but not - in retrospect, at least - quite there yet. The essential parts of the Powers recipe are present, but the brew is still a little chunky and dark.

Tim Powers: The Anubis Gates (1983)

Not so this book, which still has a claim to be considered Powers' masterpiece - the central exhibit of his early manner, at least. I was once stranded in Frankfurt airport by a snowstorm for a couple of days. I couldn't leave the hotel, and I only had one book: this one. I read it twice through in that time and it never palled. I could, in fact, pull it out and start reading it again right now. It's bloody good.

The story introduces Power's favourite Romantic faux-poet, William Ashbless, to the reader for the first time, and is endlessly, tirelessly inventive in its details. It ain't Shakespeare. Nor is it Dickens or any other high culture piece of fine writing. It has a punk soul, but it's also a kind of apotheosis of that page-turning trashiness that makes those of us brought up on them adore pulp paperbacks so much. What else can I say? Read it.

Tim Powers: Dinner at Deviant's Palace (1985)

This is a little out on a limb in Power's oeuvre. It reads, at times, more like his friend Phil Dick (Dr Bloodmoney, or Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said) than Powers himself. But that's not to say it isn't good. As post-apocalyptic narratives go, this one is excellent. It's the kind of book his first two novels were aspiring to be (he admits in his introduction to them that he was already writing a book with this title before rattling them out in a hurry: two paperbacks in the same year). Nevertheless, I think he was right to complete it and get it out of his system. It is, in effect, a kind of alternate Powers: a slightly more predictable but every bit as accomplished writer.

Not really, then, quite, Tim Powers, though it did (like its predecessor) win the Philip K. Dick Memorial award.

Tim Powers: On Stranger Tides (1987)

This one had a recent vogue when it was used as the basis for the fourth film in the Pirates of the Caribbean series. Students of the book could not have been blamed for not noticing, though: the resemblances are few and far between (coming down mostly to the presence of Blackbeard in both stories). It's a fine yarn (far better than the film, alas), with another of Powers' plucky and resourceful - but not omnipotent - protagonists, and a guest appearance from Ponce de Leon and his Fountain of Youth.

There are one or two interesting aspects to the historical research in the book, though. At one point (p. 140 in my paperback edition) there's a reference to the "murder of James 1st a century ago." This seems a little odd, since King James was not, in fact, murdered (he died of dysentery after a stroke), and introduces the possibility that this is supposed to be set in an alternate history analogous to Joan Aiken's in her Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. If so, he doesn't really follow up on the idea. Perhaps it's a fossil from some earlier, longer state of the book?

Of course, one could argue that it's actually a reference to the historical murder of King James the 1st of Scotland rather than James the 1st of England, but since that took place in 1437, it's a bit hard to see it as only a century before the present of the book (c. 1718). I bequeath this concundrum to more profound Powers scholars than myself.

Tim Powers: The Stress of Her Regard (1989)

Now this one is something special. So dense is the narrative, centering on Byron and Shelley's haunted summer (during which his wife's great novel Frankenstein was conceived), that one can hardly follow it at times. Nor is Powers' prose style quite up to the task he has set himself at times, but it remains a kind of masterpiece: a genuinely frightening and thought-provoking novel with enough inventiveness to power ten conventional plots. What isn't in there? I'd rather reread The Anubis Gates anyday than venture into this one again, but I have to admit that it scared the shit out of me, and persuaded me that readers really could take a lot of disruption in their fictional fare without giving in (hence, I suppose, some of the more intractable elements in my own first novel, Nights with Giordano Bruno).

Tim Powers: Last Call (1993)

This is the first in a trilogy and (I would say) by far the most attractive in the series. It takes on the folklore of Las Vegas in a really big way, and almost succeeds in creating an American occult mythology to rival those of old Europe. It was the first of his books to win the World Fantasy Award, and it certainly deserves it.

Tim Powers: Expiration Date (1995)

There's something monstrous about the picture of LA, full of hungry, talkative ghosts, portrayed in this novel. It reads more like the transcript of a nightmare than an amusing piece of derring-do. Re-reading it this summer, though, I found that there is some benefit in reading the whole of his "Fault Lines" trilogy in order. What seemed merely bewildering and repetitive the first time seems far more planned and deliberate in retrospect.

Tim Powers: Earthquake Weather (1997)

The poet John Masefield called one of his own adventure novels One Damned Thing After Another (or ODTAA). there's something of that in the endless (and mostly futile) attempts to bring Scott Crane (the Fisher King of the Western states) back to life in this culmination to Powers' trilogy. He does succeed in knitting all the loose ends together, but at a certain cost to the narrative pleasure principle.

Tim Powers: Declare (2001)

This one I didn't like at all when I first read it. It seemed almost perversely incomprehensible, and trying to link together too disparate a mass of material. On rereading it, though, I wonder what I was thinking about. I see it now as a brilliant fusion of spy fiction and Dan Brown-ish antiquarianism. I suppose reading more about Kim Philby in the meantime has helped me see the inventiveness and intelligence of Powers's portrait of the modern era's greatest double agent. Winner (again) of the World Fantasy Award, I'd now recommend it highly, but that earlier adverse reaction does remind me that certain aspects of it may be an acquired taste.

Tim Powers: Three Days to Never (2006)

This is a good, solid piece of Powers-iana. The characters are attractive and well-drawn, the action compelling. To someone not used to his style, it might be quite difficult to follow in parts, but to a Powers fan, this is pretty mainstream stuff. After all, there was a time when even Haruki Murakami seemed incomprehensible to most readers. In a way, I hope such universal acceptance never happens to Powers. Part of his edge comes from that sense of inhabiting a private universe with only occasional connections with everyone else's ...

Tim Powers: Hide Me Among the Graves (2012)

Wonderful. This sequel to The Stress of Her Regard (with many of the same monsters) allows Powers to go to town on the Pre-Raphaelites. Great stuff throughout, and very visual in its appeal.

Tim Powers: Medusa'a Web (2015)

Which brings us to Power's latest work, set (again) in LA - this time in Hollywood - and with a slight overtone of Shirley Jackson (both The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle - fans of either of those would find much to attract them here, I feel). There's something a little Dr. Who-like, too, in some of the action.

To be honest, I don't quite know what to think about this one yet. I like it, but it didn't grip me to the same extent as Three Days to Never. What is certain is that it shows no diminution in Powers' skills after almost forty years of scribbling - and 14 major novels. Thank God he didn't become an English Professor instead sticking to what he does best: benefiting poor suffering humanity as a spinner of wondrous tales.

Tim Powers: Strange Itineraries (2005)