Sphinx (The Supernatural Library)

Rating:
Summary: Ethereal
Review: "Sphinx" is definitely under-rated by Lindsay fans. Personally I can't get "A Voyage to Arcturus" out of my mind, and there are parts of "Sphinx" that are equally haunting, making it worth slogging through the virtually unreadable slabs of ungrammatical prose and over-wrought domestic intrigue that make up three quarters of the book. The final chapter is very stirring and powerful. If only Lindsay had had poetic talent - or even mere competency - to match his visionary genius! He would have been equal to the greatest writers of the century.

Rating:
Summary: David Lindsay's SPHINX
Review: SPHINX is a strange, romantic, fantasy novel by the mysterious Scottish author, David Lindsay, the amazing mind behind the supernatural romance, THE HAUNTED WOMAN and the metaphysical masterpiece, A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS. Devotees of his previous novels should track down SPHINX and read it, but others who are not accustomed to Lindsay should probably steer clear, or start with ARCTURUS. A copy of SPHINX is extremely difficult to find. I managed to obtain the 1988 Xanadu edition with the inroduction by Colin Wilson in a rare bookstore in London for a rather large sum. Good luck on your hunt. Perhaps because of the lukewarm public reception of ARTURUS when it was first published, Lindsay resorted to dressing up his metaphysical ideas in the trappings of the conventional British novel. In this respect SPHINX shares certain elements with THE HAUNTED WOMAN, but its plot is much more convuluted and the supernatural elements are employed even more sparingly. Without giving anything away, the plot concerns a young scientist, Nicholas Cabot who rents a room in a family's house in order to perfect his newly constructed invention. He has devised an ingenius machine which can record a sleeping person's dreams. He can then replay back the recorded dreams so that anyone can experience the dreams of the dreamer. The dream sequences are the most evocative and beautifully written in the novel and it's a pity Lindsay does not show us more of them. Instead, most of the book is devoted to the romantic intrigues of the women that orbit around young Nicholas: his landlord's pretty daughters, Mrs. Hantish, a beautiful widow, and Lore Jenson, a piano composer who has forsaken her artistic compositions for more lucrative popular music. The theme of an artist giving up his art for "what sells" is one that Lindsay certainly understands and it is a sore point with Lore as well. She is painfully aware of the choice she has made. It is also a choice Nicholas is faced with when he contemplates taking the lovely widow, Mrs. Hantish for a wife. The bulk of the book is taken up with the characters' convuluted machinations in which Nicholas allows himself to become a participant. Here, the novel begins to take on the aura of a romantic comedy of manners; a kind of amalgamation of a Turgenev soiree and a Jane Austen garden party without the wit. The story seems to become bogged down in clandestine trysts, snubbed neighbors, and secret notes "of the utmost importance." It all seems so unimportant, so trivial; the characters shallow, their motivations, petty. Giving Lindsay the benefit of the doubt, I must conclude that his purpose in all of this is to show that the actions of the characters in this real world are indeed trivial when measured against the events which occur in their subconscious--in their dreams. There is a deeper, more true reality which we cannot see, but which exists none-the-less, more important than our own corporeal existence. If this interpretation is correct then Lindsay set himself up an extremely difficult task. How does a novelist write about shallow people without putting off the reader? Although Lindsay is not entirely successful in the portrayals of the characters and the narrative mid-way through the book tends to become tiresome, the climax which takes the reader by surprise is all at once tragic, shocking, mystical and beautifully written. Despite the caveats I have mentioned, SPHINX, like Lindsay's previous work, lingers on in the imagination long after the reader has finished it like some potentous vision out of a half-remembered dream.