Mark Valentine
Peter Vansittart writes some of the most original, supple, coruscatingly erudite fiction available, usually drawing upon arcane historical eras to enact his unillusioned meditations upon fate and chance. Hermes in Paris, a new novel in his eightieth year, depicts the Hellenic god of magic, messages, thieves and trickery as a jaded dandy in the fakely gorgeous city of the Second Empire.
Hermes, adorned with a scarlet cravat, and a serpent-entwined cane, is slyly ubiquitous, amusing himself at mortal antics, tipping a peacock’ s feather into the great scales of events to unbalance them just sufficiently to stimulate disorder and change, his preferred state. He pervades the opulent and operatic city like a mood, a caprice, a fleet-footed rumour. He observes, and guides, not always to their advantage, a radical columnist who frequents the old, un-boulevarded underworld of the city, and a young schoolboy, a roamer and a loner, a reader of strange signs in the dark streets, who understands symbols that adults do not.
When I visited the author, a few years ago now, he told me that he had not been drawn to write outright supernatural fiction because he could never quite get over disbelief in the overtly unearthly, though his work is laced with his fascination for what others have believed, and is riddled with images from mythology, apocrypha, folk-magic and the secret arts.
In his latest novel, though, Hermes is depicted as both flaneur in human form and as shape-shifting deity, a subtle and swift spirit that achieves its ends by the most delicate and unassuming of interventions. There is a hint of a much lighter, much more allusive version of Woland, the incarnation of Satan in the Moscow of the Thirties, in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, who transforms that city by a series of more surreal and shocking escapades.
There is also much, in Vansittart’s novel, of the world of café conspiracies, backstreet freak-shows, slum sorcery and revolutionary broadsides which characterised the underside of the baroque cosmopolis that was Paris just before it was brought down by the disastrous war with Prussia, helped along, it seems by a delicate touch from the hand of Hermes, god of chance, god of change. If you seek for a form of supernatural fiction that is distinctive, deeply-crafted, and elegantly wise, I advise you to try this work. The quicksilver virtuosity of Peter Vansittart’s novel proves him to be a fine votary of that immortal who was also the patron-god of high arcane literature.
