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Reviews
The Bewdley Mayhem: Hellmouths of Bewdley, Pontypool Changes Everything, Caesarea by Tony Burgess
misterkyle1901's review against another edition
dark
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
thecommonswings's review against another edition
4.0
I can’t work out for the life of me how to review a book again so I’m rewriting my original one for this current reread
Anyway. Much easier to read on a second go and I suspect a third and fourth might begin to bring an actual design to these troubling and strange stories. Because there are connections and shared obsessions and a genuine sense of a troubled world, hard to explain and hard to fathom. And so much is in flux, especially someone like Dr Mendez, a troubling figure whose status nags away at me as he returns again and again in these stories. It’s a dark vision but a wonderful one
Anyway. Much easier to read on a second go and I suspect a third and fourth might begin to bring an actual design to these troubling and strange stories. Because there are connections and shared obsessions and a genuine sense of a troubled world, hard to explain and hard to fathom. And so much is in flux, especially someone like Dr Mendez, a troubling figure whose status nags away at me as he returns again and again in these stories. It’s a dark vision but a wonderful one
thecommonswings's review against another edition
5.0
My dad suffered from a particularly unpleasant side effect to his Lewy Body Dementia, something called Capgras Syndrome. It started with the delusion that my mum wasn’t just my mum, but a series of identical Shirleys each of whom fulfilled very different roles: there was the wife Shirley, the mum Shirley, the one who cooked, the one who cleaned, the one who drove and the one he didn’t like who would be bossy. Mum would go to the loo in the night and find him laying in the middle of the bed so up to ten other variations could also lie down. And the weird thing is mum is an identical twin and he had absolutely no problem with my aunt. The doubling ended up extending, in the last years of his illness, to a whole double of their house and our family who lived at the other end of the cul de sac and who he was very frightened of
Obviously, Caesarea is not about Capgras syndrome, but something about the dualities and phantom variations lying here within has the same dizzying effect as hearing from my otherwise pretty lucid dad about all these variations happening around him. I suspect the idea behind the book is to create a very literal variation of that cliche of “the seedy underbelly underneath the otherwise beautiful town”. But to confuse things, just before chaos very literally breaks out, the hidden and inner Caesarea is actually a lot less chaotic than the original one. It’s like fragments sticking to the surface of each reality, so the effect is like a never ending Moebius strip of insanity
The key, as I think is so often the case in the trilogy, is troublesome Dr Mendez. For the first time his death in the very second story in Hellmouths is directly addressed. And Grant Mazzy is also very much alive again in this second town (and confusing things on an even greater level is that both, in very different forms, appear in the film of Pontypool). Burgess is never anything short of fiendishly clever, so I think he’s very clearly dangling a superficially facile reading of the levels of reality in the book to distract us. And in many ways, this is the most easily accessible book in the trilogy. But that’s again all false dangling I think, because Burgess is cleverly drawing us down one particular narrative direction before hurling us into a wholly new one. It’s baffling, troubling and lingers in a very real way in your mind
The whole trilogy feels like an unstable, constantly in flux universe which toys with several easier readings but whose actual meanings are dizzying and unstable and just out of your grasp. I can’t remember feeling an actual NEED to reread a book immediately in the same way as I do this. And I fully understand that it will take several more readings to even begin to fathom the awful design in these frankly extraordinary books
Obviously, Caesarea is not about Capgras syndrome, but something about the dualities and phantom variations lying here within has the same dizzying effect as hearing from my otherwise pretty lucid dad about all these variations happening around him. I suspect the idea behind the book is to create a very literal variation of that cliche of “the seedy underbelly underneath the otherwise beautiful town”. But to confuse things, just before chaos very literally breaks out, the hidden and inner Caesarea is actually a lot less chaotic than the original one. It’s like fragments sticking to the surface of each reality, so the effect is like a never ending Moebius strip of insanity
The key, as I think is so often the case in the trilogy, is troublesome Dr Mendez. For the first time his death in the very second story in Hellmouths is directly addressed. And Grant Mazzy is also very much alive again in this second town (and confusing things on an even greater level is that both, in very different forms, appear in the film of Pontypool). Burgess is never anything short of fiendishly clever, so I think he’s very clearly dangling a superficially facile reading of the levels of reality in the book to distract us. And in many ways, this is the most easily accessible book in the trilogy. But that’s again all false dangling I think, because Burgess is cleverly drawing us down one particular narrative direction before hurling us into a wholly new one. It’s baffling, troubling and lingers in a very real way in your mind
The whole trilogy feels like an unstable, constantly in flux universe which toys with several easier readings but whose actual meanings are dizzying and unstable and just out of your grasp. I can’t remember feeling an actual NEED to reread a book immediately in the same way as I do this. And I fully understand that it will take several more readings to even begin to fathom the awful design in these frankly extraordinary books
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