Medusa

John Fraser'S 'Medusa' Is A Stunning Fable For Our Times In Which The Stories Of Medusa The Gorgon And The French Ship Medusa Are Intertwined To Create A Pilgrim'S Progress For The 21St Century.. Medusa Is A Trip A Bending Of The Legends. It Is A Symphonic Poem Where At The End We Even Hear A Few Notes Of A Hymn To Joy. The Fragments Of Myth Legend And Belief Drift Round Like Harmonies That Seek Resolution. But This Mode Is Post-Modern Post-Christian; It Is About The End – Yet There Is No End: It Is Story. The Resulting Tale Is An Apocryphal Blast And A Literary Tour De Force That Uncannily Captures The Zeitgeist.. About The Author:. John Fraser Is The Author Of 18 Works Of Literary And Speculative Fiction. He Has Lived In Rome Since 1980. Previously He Worked In England And Canada. The Distinguished Poet Novelist And Booker Prize Nominee John Fuller Has Written Of Fraser’S Fiction:. ‘One Of The Most Extraordinary Publishing Events Of The Past Few Years Has Been The Rapid Indeed Insistent Appearance Of The Novels Of John Fraser. There Are Few Parallels In Literary History To This Almost Simultaneous And Largely Belated Appearance Of A Mature Œuvre Sprung Like Athena From Zeus’S Forehead; And The Novels In Themselves Are Extraordinary. I Can Think Of Nothing Much Like Them In Fiction. Fraser Maintains A Masterfully Ironic Distance From The Extreme Conditions In Which His Characters Find Themselves. There Are Strikingly Beautiful Descriptions Veiled Allusions To Rooted Traditions Unlikely Events Half-Glimpsed Abrupted Narratives Surreal But Somehow Apposite Social Customs.. ‘Fraser’S Work Is Conceived On A Heroic Scale In Terms Both Of Its Ideas And Its Situational Metaphors. If He Were To Be Filmed It Would Need The Combined Talents Of A Bunuel A Gilliam A Cameron. Like Thomas Pynchon Whom In Some Ways He Resembles Fraser Is A Deep And Serious Fantasist Wildly Inventive. The Reader Rides As On A Switchback Or Luge Of Impetuous Attention With Effects Flashing By At Virtuoso Speeds. The Characters Seem To Be Unwitting Agents Of Chaos However Much Wise Reflection The Author Bestows Upon Them. They Move With Shrugging Self-Assurance Through Circumstances As Richly-Detailed And As Without Reliable Compass-Points As A Chinese Scroll.’