Many of the plot lines about destiny, and whether we create it or embrace it, spurred controversy with Christian groups. It’s a tale that involves angels and magical bears and ex-nuns and outer-body souls that accompany humans in the form of various animals called Daemons. It follows two pre-teens (Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry) on their occasional hunt for, and occasional run from, their respective parents. It’s like coming across an entirely new colour.Ĭhips Channon’s diaries Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus Dick Davis’s translation of the Shahnameh Don Paterson’s new collection, The Arctic Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song Mary Midgley’s The Owl of Minerva, etc, etc.The work of scientific fantasy takes place in a series of parallel universes and was marketed as children’s fare when originally released between the years of 19. In this and his later book, The Matter With Things, McGilchrist investigates the extraordinary difference between the characteristic modes of perception, cognition and response of the two hemispheres of the brain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist, published in 2009. I tried it later and found the mixture altogether too rich, but I shall never disparage anything I once loved, because the love was real. Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet: exactly the thing for an overheated teenager – exotic locations, grown-up sex, fancy stuff with words and images, a narrative framework involving Einstein’s theory of relativity, everything I was impressed by. Not so much a single book as all the poetry I know by heart, and all the poetry I don’t know by heart and want to. I couldn’t cope with it as a student it wasn’t until I was grown up, and married, and a parent, and trying to teach it myself, that I realised its majestic scope and depth. The whole book blazed into my life like a comet. I found it in the school library, and it included Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. The book that made me want to be a writerĪn anthology called The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, edited by Donald Allen. The majority recovered.įrances Yates, whose Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition I read after my finals at Oxford, made me realise I’d got everything wrong, and should have studied occult Renaissance philosophy.
It must have had that effect on hundreds of thousands of us. The Outsider by Colin Wilson, of course, which made me stop wanting to be a pop star and start wanting to be an intellectual instead.
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