September Castle

by Simon Raven

Basic human desires merge with the occult in a complex and erotic tale of a hunt across Europe. Ptolemaeos Tunne is determined to discover a hoard of valuable buried treasure. His only clue is a bizarre medieval legend about a possessed Greek princess with a bad reputation. What he doesn't know is that his sixteen-year-old mistress Jo-Jo has unwittingly betrayed him to some very dangerous enemies.

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Simon Arthur Noël Raven (28 December 1927 – 12 May 2001) was an English novelist, essayist, dramatist and raconteur who, in a writing career of forty years, caused controversy, amusement and offence. His obituary in The Guardian noted that, "he combined elements of Flashman, Waugh's Captain Grimes and the Earl of Rochester", and that he reminded Noel Annan, his Cambridge tutor, of the young Guy Burgess.

Among the many things said about him, perhaps the most quoted was that he had "the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel". E W Swanton called Raven's cricket memoir Shadows on the Grass "the filthiest cricket book ever written". He has also been called "cynical" and "cold-blooded", his characters "guaranteed to behave badly under pressure; most of them are vile without any pressure at all". His unashamed credo was "a robust eighteenth-century paganism....allied to a deep contempt for the egalitarian code of post-war England"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_R...

Reviews

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5, rounded up.

This and The Roses Of Picardie were both written by Raven between his two multi-volume series and are of similar ilk; to wit, long, convoluted tales of skullduggery in foreign lands, with various of the characters from those series seeking mystical treasures that come with rather arcane histories and curses attached. One needs some very large grains of salt (OK, an entire salt lick's worth) to swallow some of this balderdash - but these are still quite fun and entertaining to read, and they fill in some plot holes and character arcs from the series - so on that account alone are worth reading.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have a great fondness for Simon Raven, but his novels are very variable and later ones down right awful. This is one of his later ones when he was under deadline to write a lot . Describing it as problematic is to avoid saying that it is a farrago of tosh with dollops of nonsensical supernatural underpinnings and is only for the die-hard fan who is willing to overlook a mountain of logical and stylistic flaws.

The problem is that if you are going to write a book involving the supernatural it has to be done with the same honesty as, for example, writing a 'locked room' detective story. You can't just 'solve' it by saying, oh there was a secret door. That is cheating and while Mr. Raven doesn't exactly cheat his characters from being ordinary academics, for example, to credulous believers in 'spooky' stuff at the drop of hat. I don't mind Raven's descent into 'weird' storylines, it appeared in early books like 'Doctors wear Scarlet' but here it is crudely and carelessly done.