Black Swords and Chaos Lords: Bob Haberfield Art News
Also... Tolkien, Folk Horror, Pretentious vs Classy Modern Novels, the SAS and return to the haunted fairy groves of Dolmenwood...
Bob Haberfield: The Man and his Art
I’m really excited about this month’s news. After several years of patient and meticulous work the monograph about the late Bob Haberfield is finally at the printers. As you can see from the test copies below, it’s actually two volumes - Bob Haberfield I: The Man, and Bob Haberfield II: His Art which will be available together in a slipcase from Jayde Design very shortly.
Bob’s son Ben, John Davey, John Coulthart and myself have worked hard over the past few years to catalogue the immense collection of art, select the pieces we felt best represented the incredible range of styles, media and subjects he tackled, and assemble them into what will certainly be a stunning collection.
Bob Haberfield is perhaps most well know for his science fiction and fantasy covers, especially the ones he produced for the Mayflower editions of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion novels in the 1960s and 1970s. Very few artists since have come close to capturing the lush, baroque exoticism of the books. Moorcock himself asked for the paintings to be used after seeing a stack of them at the publisher’s office.
Yet the Moorcock covers are only a fraction of Bob Haberfield’s works. He did a lot of other commercial work (anyone buying a bottle of talcum powder from M&S in the 80s might have come across his flower decorations), but also stunning examples of fine art. Abstracts, Primitivism, meticulous portraiture, elegaic landscapes and much more are all represented in the books. These are accompanied by several essays, including a heartfelt biography about Bob Haberfield’s often troubled life by his son, Ben. I’m very proud to have been part of a project preserving this remarkable man’s legacy.
As soon as the books are available for purchase I’ll post a special announcement. In the meantime listen to this great podcast where Ben Haberfield talks about his dad.
Books Read in June
J. R. R. Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter, 2011
This book proves that writing a biography of the man behind The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings is a challenge to say the least. At the end of the day, Tolkien was an obsessive academic who appears to lived almost entirely in his own head. Deeply reactionary and conservative (he hated motor cars and the French in equal measure), he escaped from the modern world into Middle Earth where he created his idealised medieval realm - a bucolic hankering for his childhood when he lived in the countryside with his mother. Carpenter flounders around for anything of significant interest to write about Tolkien’s “ordinary unremarkable life”, and the only conclusion I could come to was that anything and everything of interest about J. R. R. Tolkien lies in his books. 3/5
Withered Hill, David Barnett, 2024
My initial thoughts were that this was a fairly straightforward folk horror novel set in an isolated village and full of familiar tropes (country bumpkins in animal masks, bizarre rituals, visitors can’t leave the place etc.). It soon turned into a really excellent and well-written story, with an underlying gut-twisting premise that pulled the rug out from under the reader towards the end. Highly recommended. 4/5
Question 7, Richard Flanagan, 2023
A lot of worthy commentators praised this to the skies as life-changing and profoundly great literature. I kind of get it. It’s a fragmented meditation on time and memory, and attempts to encapsulate the life of the author and his father while pointing out how hard the task is at regular intervals. In the end I just found it very pretentious and self-consciously ‘arty’. A lot of it has been done before in one form or another - most notably by the infinitely better writer Marcel Proust. It’s still an interesting read, though. I followed it up with Sally Rooney’s equally-lauded Intermezzo and the contrast was just embarrassing. 2/5
Intermezzo, Sally Rooney, 2024
This one does deserve the effusive burblings plastered on the cover and back. It really is brilliant. Three Joycean monologues interwoven with consummate skill. Sally Rooney moves from external impressionistic scene building to narrative through dialogue to internal life, and back again, and it is seamless. Also genuinely very moving. So in a worthy-art-off competition between Rooney and Flanagan, Rooney wins hands down. 5/5
The Seven, Peter Newman, 2017
This is the last volume in The Vagrant trilogy. The first novel, The Vagrant took a lot of getting used to but ended up very enjoyable. Book 2, The Malice, lost it a little and, in the end, felt too much like a YA teenage-girl-saves-the-world tale for my liking. This last volume, The Seven is a lot tighter, largely because it’s pretty much a chase and a siege. This leaves more room for some very spectacular wordbuilding, on a par with Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. There are occasional style lapses, as when scenes are described in a series of short double-take sentences which rapidly becomes tiresome. I’m just being nit-picky though as, on the whole, it’s a highly enjoyable read. 3/5
The Siege: The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama, Ben MacIntyre, 2024
Gripping stuff. Well-written as always. Ben MacIntyre is an excellent historian when it comes to the complexities of the shady side of international politics, where nothing is ever black and white. This is no different. At the time it all seemed all so cut and dried - deranged Iranian terrorists taking hostages and being defeated by the SAS. The reality was much more nuanced and in many ways more tragic for all concerned, including the perpetrators and the soldiers who defeated them. Fascinating. 4/5
Role Playing Games - Dolmenwood pdfs released!
I’ve talked about the Table Top Roleplaying Game Dolmenwood before. This is a wonderful setting for anyone interested in dark fairy tales and sinister enchantment (think Angela Carter and Lord Dunsany). Gavin Norman took the original Dungeons and Dragons rules, edited them into coherence, and used them as the core system for an astonishingly detailed setting. It’s Narnia as directed by Guillermo del Toro or Sam Raimi. My only quibble is that it is so detailed and rich it sometimes leaves little room for the Gamesmaster and players to maneuver.
Anyway, the three core books are available now in pdf format. They are beautiful to look at, not least because of the artwork by the Finnish artist Pauliina Hannuniemi.
That’s it for this month. Work on my own novel proceeds apace and hopefully I’ll have more news next month. In the meantime, as soon as the Bob Haberfield books are ready for purchase I’ll post the link.
Have a great July - John