"Colin Greenland - A Passion For Lord Pierrot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenland Colin)

A Passion for Lord Pierrot
a short story by Colin Greenland

Introduction

I wrote this story for David Garnett's Zenith 2 anthology, as another in
the series of portraits of nasty men that includes Tarven Guille the
taxidermist in Other Voices and Isa's father the mad inventor in 'The
Wish'. What they share is a mastery of dubious science, an appalling
attitude towards women and an infinite capacity for arrogant, romantic
self-delusion. Mortimer Lychworthy, twenty-eighth Earl of Io and Master of
the Guild of Aether Pilots, is obviously another of the same fellowship.
Why I've been compelled to pillory these grotesque examples of extreme
tendencies in my own sex is a mystery to me. Presumably it's in some sense
the other side of the more prominent mystery, which people always seize
upon and question me about when I'm on stage: why are all my novels about
women?
Actually, I don't think it is a mystery, unless there's an equivalent
mystery in Mary Shelley writing about Victor Frankenstein or Ruth Rendell
writing about Inspector Wexford. The mystery is perhaps why more men
haven't done it. That doesn't mean I know why I do it, though. I can tell
you that it's not a matter of decision. The character always comes first,
as a whole person, whose story I am to tell. What that story actually is,
is a matter of many, many decisions, as is how I am to tell it. For this
piece I adopted the Commedia dell'Arte imagery and elegiac, bitter-sweet
tone I first encountered in works by Michael Moorcock, the chronicles of
Jerry Cornelius and of the Dancers at the End of Time. The narrative
voice, detached, anonymous, but still quite personal, I also borrowed from
Mike, before learning that he had also borrowed it, from George Meredith.
It was one sentence in this story, the one about 'the gala concert on
Artemisia to celebrate the opening of the new Trans-Galactic Passage',
that gave me my first glimpse into the universe of Harm's Way.
-- CG

A Passion for Lord Pierrot

In the land of Anise, on the planet of Triax, it is the hour after dinner.
Lord Pierrot sits alone in his apartment, playing the accordion. He
reclines on a couch and plays a slow, sad tango. A melancholy fit is upon
him, for he remembers the past, the years before he came into his
inheritance.
He is thinking of other nights, nights of gaiety when he sauntered with
his comrades through yellow gardens on the moon, the same moon that now
shines on the lake, turning it the colour of fine honey. On those nights
he had not a care to his name, and the songs he sang were merry. He was
young then, Lord Pierrot, and now he is old, as they reckon such things on
the planet of Triax.
Lord Pierrot's whole apartment is most sumptuously appointed. The
furnishings are made of velvet, the floor of glossy yellow hardwood
imported all the way from Peru, on Earth. Splendid specimens of the local