STERNNESS 3 6 3

faster, on a frenzied run through the countryside, but no matter how fast they ran they always stayed in the same place.

RICHARD DAWKINS The Blind Watchmaker, 1986

Roadrunner Roadrunner is an American cartoon character, a bird that can run extremely fast and always manages to outrun its arch-enemy, a coyote called Wile E. Coyote.

Speedy Gonzalez Speedy Gonzalez is a Mexican mouse in a series of Warner Brothers cartoons, noted for his ability to run very fast.

White Rabbit In Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), the White Rabbit is perpetually in a hurry, always scurrying away from her and anxiously consulting his watch because he is so late. • See special entry D ALICE IN

WONDERLAND 0/7 /?. 10.

Sternness

Descriptions of a person's forbidding appearance, severe demeanour, or

strict behaviour often invoke the names of renowned puritans such as

CALVIN and KNOX • See also Anger, Disapproval.

John Calvin John Calvin (1509-64) was a French Protestant theologian and reformer, a leader of the Protestant Reformation in France and Switzerland. His name has come to be closely identified with strict puritanism and a rigid moral code.

Hell and damnation: he knew about the very unofficial tapes. And Teddy with a puritan conscience that made Messrs Knox and Calvin look flexible, even soft. Not the moment to be precipitate myself. Not the occasion for the full and frank admission.

RAYMOND FLYNN Busy Body, 1998

John Knox John Knox (c. 1505-72) was a Scottish Protestant reformer and preacher, greatly influenced by Calvin. He is alluded to as someone who is stern and disapproving.

The handsome sergeant's features were during this speech as rigid and stern as John Knox's in addressing his gay young queen.

THOMAS HARDY Far From the Madding Crowd, 1874

Well, let's say that John Knox would have been happy with it. It lasted twenty minutes, went on a lot about sacred duties, home-making, nest-building, nurturing, emotionally supporting, understanding that Cod had placed man and woman in their respective spheres and no man should mess around with that and then touched quite a lot on wicked secular ideas that were turning our womenfolk into fit candidates for Sodom and Gomorrah along with all the emasculated perverts that are today's menfolk.

RUTH DUDLEY EDWARDS Matricide at St Martha's, 1994

3 6 4 STORYTELLERS

RhadamanthllS Rhadamanthus was the son of Zeus and Europa, and brother of Minos, who, as a ruler and judge in the underworld, was renowned for his justice. The term 'Rhadamanthine' has come to mean stern and incorruptible in judgement.

Women at forty do not become ancient misanthropes, or stern Rhadamanthine moralists, indifferent to the world's pleasures—no, even though they be widows. ANTHONY TROLLOPE The Small House at Allington, 1862

Storytellers

References to famous literary storytellers can be applied to people recounting a story or anecdote or indeed giving any kind of account.

• See also Oratory.

Ancient Mariner The Ancient Mariner is the central character and narrator in Samuel Coleridge's poem 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' (1798). He stops a wedding guest at the door of the church where a wedding is about to take place, and insists on recounting the tale of how he shot an albatross at sea and the misfortune and suffering that subsequently befell the crew. The term 'Ancient Mariner' can be can be used to describe either a compulsive speaker, irresistible to his audience, as someone boring a reluctant listener, or as someone who insists on telling their tale of woe.

In Oily's demeanour as he took another sip of his cocktail and prepared to speak there was a suggestion of that Ancient Mariner of whom the poet Coleridge wrote. Like him, he knew he had a good story to relate, and he did not intend to hurry it. p. c. woDEHousE Cocktail Time, 1958

Gentle reader, I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath its will like the Ancient Mariner.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS Naked Lunch, 1959

It's not that I subscribe to The Most Horrific Pain You Can Imagine manifesto of the Ancient Mariner-style experienced mother, who takes pleasure in traumatising women about to give birth for the first time.

777e Independent, 1994

DemodocilS Demodocus was a blind bard at the Phaeacian court of Alcinous who, according to Homer's Odyssey, entertained Odysseus with his songs telling of the adulterous love of Ares and Aphrodite and of the famous story of the Wooden Horse of Troy.

It was quite impossible—recounting tales in the presence of people who knew them already. She wondered how Taliesin, Demodocus and all the other storytellers had coped.

ALICE THOMAS ELLIS The 27th Kingdom, 1982

Scheherazade Scheherazade is the narrator of the Arabian Nights, the bride of

STRANGENESS 3 6 5

King Shahriyar who, after discovering his first wife's infidelity, has sworn to marry a new wife each day and execute her the next morning. Scheherazade escapes this fate by telling him stories in instalments, always breaking off at an interesting point, promising to resume the story the next night. After 1,001 nights of her storytelling, King Shahriyar cancels his threat.

At my next appointment, feeling rather like Scheherazade unfolding one of her never-ending, telescopic tales to king Schahriar, I took up where I had left off. ROBERTSON DAviEs The Manticore, 1972

Her voice fills in the intervals between nurses and consultant's rounds, visitors and sleep. After days, possibly weeks, maybe years, I realize that she's telling me a story. She is my own Scheherazade, she knows everything, she must be the storyteller from the end of the world.

KATE ATKINSON Human Croquet, 1997

Taliesin Taliesin was a 6th-century Welsh bard, to whom a considerable quantity of poetry has been ascribed. He is the supposed author of the Book of Taliesin (14th cent.), a collection of heroic poems.

If the Obie thing broke, the famed cottage (therapeutic oratory, refuge and sacrarium, Brentwood's own confessional Taliesin of above-the-line tears, fears and renewal) would be the sudden locus of Hard Copy helicopters, Vanity Fair layouts and O.J.ish lookie-loos.

BRUCE WAGNER I'm Loosing You, 1997

Strangeness

Surrealism is, of course, a 20th-century movement and this theme does seem to have a much stronger 20th-century stamp to it than many others in this book.

Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll's children's story Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is an account of a young girl's encounters with a collection of strange animals and people in a surreal, illogical, dream-like world. The phrase 'Alice-in-Wonderland' can be used to describe a puzzling, seemingly illogical situation. • See special entry • ALICE IN WONDERLAND on p. 10.

It is easy, though, to lose the track in the confusion of tyre-marks and rough signposts, and when this happens the driver, a small wiry Londoner baked to the colour of burned custard, navigates by a combination of map-reading and guesswork. He drove a taxi before the war, it emerges, and treats the desert with contemptuous familiarity, as though it were some Alice-in-Wonderland inversion of London topography.

PENELOPE LIVELY Moon Tiger, 1998

Arabian Nights The Arabian Nights are a collection of exotic and fantastic stories written in Arabic, also called Arabian Nights' Entertainments or The

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Toiling up the slope from Falmer railway station, you had the Kafkaesque sensation of walking into an endlessly deep stage set where apparently three-dimensional objects turned out to be painted flats, and reality receded as fast as you pursued it.

DAVID LODGE Nice Work, 1988

When I asked why, the spokesman, a decent man just trying to earn a crust like the rest of us, tried his best to explain the Government's Kafkaesque logic.

The Observer, 1997

René Magritte René Magritte (1898-1967) was a Belgian Surrealist painter. His paintings have a dream-like quality, juxtaposing the ordinary, the strange, and the erotic, all depicted with meticulous realism.

Monty Python Monty Python's Flying Circus was a popular British TV comedy series of the 1970s, noted for the surreal absurdity of many of its sketches. The word 'Pythonesque' is used to describe humour of a similarly bizarre or zany kind.

At Brize Norton, at least, someone seemed to be making attempts to set up a kind of rapport between the local and the military presences. There were notices advertising a camp car boot sale and a summer fete, besides the one cheerfully alerting the villagers to the dangers of 'RAF police dogs on patrol! A sort of surreal, MontyPythonish charm hangs over these juxtapositions.

The Observer, 1997

Narnia Narnia is the name of the imaginary land in which C S Lewis set his children's fantasy The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) and six subsequent stories. Narnia's inhabitants include talking beasts (notably the lion Asian), giants, centaurs, and witches.

The first chapter of Amelior Regained consisted of a discussion between one of the men and one of the women, in a forest, about social justice. In other words, here was some Narnian waterbaby or other and some titless Hobbit or other, with her foot on a log, talking freedom.

MARTIN AMIS The Information, 1995

Piranesi Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) was an Italian engraver and architect famous for his views of the ruins of Rome and fantastic etchings of imaginary prisons (1745-61).

When it was time for the first train in the morning, he would go back to the

mysteriously deserted, Piranesi perspectives of the station, discoloured by dawn.

ANCELA CARTER Fireworks, 1974

Sinbad The hero of one of the tales in the Arabian Nights, Sinbad is a rich young man of Baghdad who relates the fantastic adventures he meets with in his seven voyages. Among these are his encounter with the Old Man of the Sea and his being carried aloft by the Roc, a giant bird.

He delighted the rustics with his songs, and, like Sinbad, astonished them with his stories of strange lands, and shipwrecks, and sea-fights.

WASHINGTON IRVING The Sketch-Book, 1 8 1 9 - 2 0

Twilight Zone The Twilight Zone was an American television series (1959-65) which told a different supernatural or sciencefictionstory every week. The title of the series is sometimes alluded to in the context of a seemingly supernatural