Showing results by author "John Fraser" in All Categories

Everyone is a part-time person. They do one thing while imagining being elsewhere, or being a lover, worker, fan - of something - or in some other life. We hope for a resolution, a better place, where the bad parts can be discarded, the good ones realised. In PARADISE, we are plunged into ever-deeper contradictions, separations: by nature a deserter, a pacifist, Harri is enrolled, becomes a soldier - becomes literally someone else. As a batman, he can fly - along with his superiors, with lovers who fly higher, outdistance him or, fatally, hit the ground. After many adventures, Harri finds ...

John Fraser's ''Enterprising Women' is a sequence of stories of women in difficult circumstances , who contrive to avoid - and sometimes cause - the worst of consequences. In 'The Flies', the women are witness to violence and temptation, and although one of the heroines succumbs to alcohol, the others manage to maintain their extraneous, and independent, positions. In 'Landfall', the protagonist, a spymaster, survives the loss and betrayal of her male companions, maintains her scepticism regarding the value of her profession, and ultimately we presume she continues on her solitary path, ...

John Fraser's 'Hard Places' consists of three novellas, Red Snow, The Rock and The Sea. They concern human struggles with Nature and human natures. Red Snow involves efforts to have the better of chance by gaming, and the forms of self-discipline this requires. The Rock shows the eternal certainties of art crumbling into inexplicable absences and shady deals. The Sea evokes our longing for submersion in nature when we wish to coneal our misdeeds and rejections. About the author: John Fraser is the author of 18 works of literary and speculative fiction. He has lived in Rome since 1980. ...

John Fraser's 'Medusa' is a stunning fable for our times, in which the stories of Medusa, the Gorgon and the French ship Medusa are intertwined to create a Pilgrim's Progress for the 21st century. Medusa is a trip, a bending of the legends. It is a symphonic poem, where at the end, we even hear a few notes of a hymn to joy. The fragments of myth, legend and belief drift round like harmonies that seek resolution. But this mode is post-modern, post-Christian; it is about the end – yet there is no end: it is story. The resulting tale is an apocryphal blast and a literary tour de force that ...

The latest work of fiction by John Fraser (‘the most original novelist of our time’, John Fuller, Whitbread Award winner and Booker Prize nominee) consists of two stories about aspiration, and how that is suited to a short reflective life, rather than a long happenstance. ‘O the Poor Horses’ tells of a super-athlete, climber and circus star, Pierre, whose aim is to reach the top of the tent, and then beyond – perfection of the body and its mind. When Pierre tumbles and is crippled, Dora, his assistant and companion, once his facilitator who has become a dead weight, must take on ...

Blue Light comprises two novellas by John Fraser: 'Blue Light: After the End' and 'Starting Over'. We may like to imagine we know what the end of the world will be like – and maybe it will not be dissimilar to our own individual ends. 'Blue Light' shows what it’s like, the running down, the onset of rigor mortis, the new life sprouting, notwithstanding. About the author: John Fraser is the author of 18 works of literary and speculative fiction. He has lived in Rome since 1980. Previously he worked in England and Canada. The distinguished poet, novelist and Booker Prize nominee John ...

In three fables, John Fraser’s The Red Tank presents founding myths and 21st century epics – viewed with a kind of Martian ‘taken-abackness’. In our new globalised world, what happens to the little beings, our species, and their allies among the beasts – do they grow, becoming giant, innocent philosophers, or do they go off to rut and runt in the forest? The human project is once more immense: taming nature, securing peace, creating order. The protagonists are fabulous, easily the equals of ancient gods and heroes. In the first fable, ‘Chinese Whispers’, we try to subdue and ...

The Other Shore focuses on a critical point in Soviet history. It deals with young Soviet intellectuals, bright but not brilliant, confronting a future threatened with war and stagnation, but still with the impetus of post-Stalinist regeneration. Rather than being a chronicle of the debates between neo-Bolsheviks, Leninists, social and liberal democrats, Trotskyists, Westernisers and traditionalists, it depicts a more modest but more frequently encountered search for commitment, for a meaningful political and social life, in a vast country where light and darkness flicker and alternate ...

The latest tour de force in speculative fiction from John Fraser. The 'Military Roads' of this book, which consists of three tales running consecutively, are, first, the adventures of a narrator following the fortunes of a leader of a revolution in a distant country: second, a journey starting in the 'military road' which in Soviet times and before, ran from Moscow to the Caucasus: and finally, a mission undertaken from Italy, through North Africa, with the aim of recruiting a private army of bodyguards for a global tycoon. The narrator's amorous adventures, and his struggles to survive ...

John Fraser’s latest work of fiction follows the refugee Khalil in two related stories, ‘The Refugees’ and ‘Travels with Strangers’. We are all refugees seeking an entry to soCaucasmewhere when we’ve left somewhere else. Our knowledge is a raft that’s carried us on lumpy seas. We can forget all that when we arrive. It doesn’t serve. We don’t, of course, stop being refugees, not ever, but we have a lot of living to do while we’re forgetting where we were before. It’s a commonplace, to say we’re strangers to ourselves – not only when we are alone, but especially when...

In John Fraser’s novel The Storm, three policy experts are at a conference, where their principals are swept away by a storm. One of the experts is held for ransom, but is released in time to join the others as they discuss the new, leaderless, dispensation. They try various strategies to achieve power – the ex-Yugoslav, suspected of war crimes, and possible under-age sexual misdemeanours, proposes infiltrating the bureaucracy, but is unsuccessful. The initiative seems to lie with Melinda, the best-connected expert, who is also an adventurous musician. They consider an incursion into ...

What is victory? What would victory actually be in our present world? What would revolution be – and what would happen after? In John Fraser’s latest novel, Mack meets an old combatant, a revolutionary, his revolution accomplished: satisfied. He leaves his girlfriend Sophie, but never shakes her off. He tries revealed religion, mysticism, sex. Through his showy friend, Paco, he meets Aurora – a flaky performer, a woman every man would die for her. He tries to define what's on the inside from the outside – specifically, a poor, resource-rich country, between revolt and foreign ...

Thinking Scientifically is John Fraser's latest wildly original, experimental work of fiction: three stories ('The Opera', 'Round the World', 'The Shaft') centred on one theme: while we can think scientifically, can we be scientifically? We can train as scientists - but that's a job, and when we stop doing it - we're the same chimpanzee types as everybody else. When we think scientifically, what happens to all the other layers, the modalities, systems, of thought and being: the magical, the religious, the hunting and the gathering, the philosophical, the artistic...? The characters in the ...

The Observatory is a novel about political commitment and liberation. Set in 1968, it reflects the high season of Guevara in Bolivia, and the attempts to insert a revolutionary 'foco' in places where objective conditions are politically ripe, but where the subjective element, and the most rudimentary organisation, are absent. Guerilla intellectuals, loaded with visionary enthusiasm, arrive like space travellers, igniting the revolutionary straw and engaging armies, but too respectful to damage the traditions and culture of those who are to be liberated ... About the author: John Fraser is ...

In 'Runners' John Fraser delivers, in his unique, distinctive voice, the story of a kind of redemption – even a kind of utopia – or as much of a utopia as we can possibly expect, given what we know about most of our political leaders … An unelected leader buys the office of deputy mayor. Although this ‘boss’ is a monster, he also has a rare, enlightened side. Where other leaders cling to power, he runs – but instead of running for office, he runs from office; he and his friends become the Runners – the running dogs. Runners is a contemporary remake of Machiavelli’s Prince ...

A lawyer looks for the tiny rock of guilt in a sea of innocence. A lawyer looks for the tiny rock of innocence in a sea of guilt. That's their trade.' John Fraser has been described as 'the most original novelist of our time' by the Whitbread Award Winner and Book Prize nominee John Fuller. In Fraser's latest novel, after a convulsive war that rumbles on for thirty years a disparate group search amongst the metal skeletons, detritus and urban wreckage of a shattered land for a new life, a new start and some kind of normality. The group, comprising therapists and entrepreneurs, including the...

The theme of the three stories that make up John Fraser’s latest literary tour de force, Animal Tales, is sacrifice. Sacrifice for others, for those close to one, or as a once-religious, generalised act. The context is a nature ‘personalised’ in the form of its animals – animals as the screen on which humans project their aspirations and their failures. In the first tale, the female protagonist suffers a series of disappointments – in her art, her civilisation, and the violation of her body. There remains for her only the self-denial and cleansing of consumption by an animal. In '...

John Fraser’s previous work of fiction, 'Hard Places', was a series of novellas concerning physical and moral dilemmas, left unresolved at the expense of the protagonist. This sequel, 'Soft Landing', is the opposite – a novel of quest and adventure, in which scruple is overcome, and demanding or impossible situations have outcomes favourable to the hero. The trail takes us from urban violence to Eldorado, the regime of a bikers’ club, and the secret finds of a prospectors’ camp. The last section shows all puzzles solved, and the protagonists’ return home with gifts. In keeping ...

A selection of John Fraser’s short stories and poems together with the novella 'Black Masks’. About the author: John Fraser is the author of 18 works of literary and speculative fiction. He has lived in Rome since 1980. Previously he worked in England and Canada. The distinguished poet, novelist and Booker Prize nominee John Fuller has written of Fraser’s fiction: ‘One of the most extraordinary publishing events of the past few years has been the rapid, indeed insistent, appearance of the novels of John Fraser. There are few parallels in literary history to this almost simultaneous ...

Wayfaring, the latest of John Fraser's tour de forces in experimental fiction, consists of three novellas, with the common theme of travelling in difficult places. '‘Coming in to Land on Saturn’ is the (fictionalised) account of the extreme physical and psychological experiences of a trainee Intelligence operative. In ‘Sometimes the Watchman Is Drunk’ four people travel round the ethnically fragmented regions of Southern Yugoslavia before the wars of the 1990s. Faced with the imminence of communist breakup, the four turn to self-inquiry, as the future becomes more troubled and ...