Thursday, November 10, 2011

Review of "The Warlock"


Review by William Holt.

If you like big novels set on Aegean Islands, you could do far worse than to read Nicholas Boving's The Warlock. It will take you right into a monastery and to a strange den of iniquity, both set against each other on a little island with great natural beauty, primitive transport, and such people as may be found everywhere if you know where to look and if you don't mind being both uplifted and appalled. You won't easily forget the experience!

My other most vivid experience of the Grecian milieu, apart from Homer, is Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Though evocative, Durrell, like many authors using first person pov, can be unnecessarily obscure and suffocatingly subjective. Nothing of that sort appears in Nicholas's narrator. He's likable, straightforward, and not troubled with any of Durrell's misty romanticism, which from the first paragraphs of Justine, put me in mind of Lovecraft, though he's differently oriented and certainly superior in talent.