Merlin
(Copyright 1978; First American Edition 1979 Putnam), by Robert Nye.
I first got this book in a Bantam paperback edition back
in 1981, off the spinner-rack at a Pic’n’Pac near the town college. That it was
about Merlin intrigued me, of course, but the fact that the cover advertised it
as “A Very Adult Fantasy” gave me a moment’s pause. Still, I was
graduating high school that year, so I figured it was time to put my big boy
pants on. After all, it couldn’t be straight-out pornography.
Nor was it. The most that could be said about it was that
was bawdy, not erotic: almost in the same fashion as Rabelais or Chaucer, but
with a comedic injection contrasting Medieval style and story with dirty jokes
and over the top ‘adult’ situations. The story of Merlin, born a failed
Antichrist trying to thwart his father the devil’s plans, always finds
his efforts undermined by human weakness, in the end especially his own. Merely
human endeavor, no matter how wise, cannot save mankind while it stands poised
on the banana peel of doom.
Well, I went on to college and found Falstaff (a longer and more engaging work), and followed his books until his crowning achievement, The Late Mr. Shakespeare (1998), the last, I think, of his ‘Thomas Urquhart’- style novels. He died in 2016. I have been trying to get a hardback copy of Merlin for years, and finally found one at a reasonably low price. While I do not consider Nye’s novels all undisputable masterpieces (his main fame was as a poet), I do find them engaging entertainments that offer their own special appeal that one can find nowhere else, a blend of philosophy and scatology. There are a couple of his novels, dealing with Gilles de Rais and Lord Byron, that I would like to try.
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