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Alice's Masque
It is September 1991, three days before the autumnal equinox. Ronan is driving westwards into Cornwall, looking for the lover he has lost, and desperate to reclaim her. The search will bring him to Roseleye - the gull-coloured house by the sea where Alice has lived for almost fifty years since her time of scandal and disgrace.
- GenresFiction
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1994
3 people are currently reading
39 people want to read
About the author
Lindsay Clarke
34 books41 followersLindsay Clarke is a British novelist. He was educated at Heath Grammar School in Halifax and at King's College Cambridge. He worked in education for many years, in Africa, America and the UK, before becoming a full-time writer. He currently lives in Somerset with his wife, Phoebe Clare, who is a ceramic artist. Clarke lectures in creative writing at Cardiff University, and teaches writing workshops in London and Bath. Four radio plays were broadcast by BBC Radio 4, and a number of his articles and reviews have been published in 'Resurgence' and 'The London Magazine.' Lindsay has one daughter from his first marriage.
His novel The Chymical Wedding, partly inspired by the life of Mary Anne Atwood, won the Whitbread Prize in 1989. Clarke's most recent novel is THE WATER THEATRE (published in September 2010 by Alma Booka), of which a review by Antonia Senior in THE TIMES of 28 August said "There is nothing small about this book. It is huge in scope, in energy, in heart...It is difficult to remember a recent book that is at once so beautiful and yet so thought provoking."
His novel The Chymical Wedding, partly inspired by the life of Mary Anne Atwood, won the Whitbread Prize in 1989. Clarke's most recent novel is THE WATER THEATRE (published in September 2010 by Alma Booka), of which a review by Antonia Senior in THE TIMES of 28 August said "There is nothing small about this book. It is huge in scope, in energy, in heart...It is difficult to remember a recent book that is at once so beautiful and yet so thought provoking."
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 11, 2012
After The Magus by John Fowles, I think Alice's Masque and Chymical Wedding are two of the most brilliant books written from a psychological perspective similar to Jung's concepts of symbols, transformation, and individuation leading to an authentic self. I was riveted with this novel, the impact of the swan, incredibly personal since it's been my totem animal since the 1970's.
Strong, complex and mysterious, Alice's Masque is a compelling story which circles in and around itself capturing the reader in a depth experience. Clarke's language is lush and mysterious, dressed in the harshness of the Cornish coastline. I read this insightful novel many years ago and it figures in the Top Ten books which changed my life deeply, I'm reading it again. Alice's Masque embraces the English fascination with the Middle Ages, knights and monks, ladies of queenly natures who, wise, by way of observation, when encountered, may summon a seeker to the inner quest, which proves more of a test than the outward journeys of the Crusades
And this was at the height of English post-modern fiction from the likes of Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, A.S. Byatt and more.
While Alice's Masque was first in the novels of transformation written by Clarke and has the same feel, it is in fact, quite a different story told in a different way. It starts with three women at the seaside in Yorkshire, in a wild and beautiful area and the theme harkens back to the concept of the Courts of Love from the Middle Ages, when women were to judge for crimes against the heart. Seventy year old Alice, a weaver and astrologer taught Medieval Studies at the university level before she shocked everyone her affair with a younger man so withdrew form society, first with her lover and then alone, where she becomes a well known artist and weaver. I won't say much more because I hate to reveal plots. As with movies, I want to be surprised at almost every curve and shift in a movie.
But I will say, this novel is quite different because as it's told from the viewpoint from Alice we have a rather unique perspective due to her age and experience. There are few boundaries in this novel, which can be cruel and brutal as often as it is touching and poignant. And the blur of boundaries often takes place between reality, dreams and active imagination.
It's odd that while reading this book, someone sent me a link to Psychology Today and there was an article on the Highly Sensitive Persons HSPs which has been researched a good bit over the past five or ten years. This is a rather new typology, a subset of the introvert with slightly different characteristics.
A the recent article, Time Magazine: "The Power of (Shyness)" and High Sensitivity
first published in Time and then reprinted in Psychology Today which referenced an earlier Psychology Today article, "Sense and Sensibility," from 1969 you can see the research has been going on for a while.
"Ernest Hartmann, a psychiatrist at Tufts University best known for his dream research. Around the same time, he was solidifying the concept of boundaries as a dimension of personality and way of experiencing the world. Life, he observes, is made up of boundaries—between past and present, you and me, subject and object. And people differ in the way they embody and perceive boundaries.
In his schema, people with thin mental boundaries do not clearly separate the contents of consciousness, so that a fantasy life of daydreaming may bump right up against everyday reality. It's as if those with thin boundaries have porous shells that allow more of their environment to penetrate and "get" to them—and into their dreams, Hartmann's concept of the thin-boundaried seemed to suggest that there indeed exists a group of people who take in a whole lot more than others.
Today, science is validating a group of people whose sensitivity surfaces in many domains of life. Attuned to subtleties of all kinds, they have a complex inner life and need time to process the constant flow of sensory data that is their inheritance.
Highly sensitive people are all around us. They make up about 20 percent of the population, and likely include equal numbers of men and women. All the available evidence suggests they are born and not made.
This description totally explains an elderly person of an HSPs nature.
And I can attest to that myself being one. All my life, I've been told to get my head out of the clouds (I was in a fantasy almost all day through school and then through much of my failed marriage) but now I see there was no way I could. It's just how I was genetically programmed from birth and further pushed by the death of my father when I was five. Once I started writing I mined that world on the other side of a very slim veil for poetry and novels but just within the past year, I've noticed my dream life now invades my awake life, without any active imagination on my own. Images just break through, more often when I'm alone, reading, but they have nothing to do with the subject matter of the book. It happens more often than not now, everyday and often I am able to participate in a dream and change it while I'm still asleep or half asleep. It's often hard to tell, they seem the same world at times.
Much of Alice's Masque is like this from the first shocking pivotal events, through a brutal crime on the beach, and a manhunt, to lovers testing, chasing, thwarting and hurting each other, when all they want to do is open up and be authentic. And there is one way, slowly revealed through a series of bizarre experiences and encounters. Ultimately its a story about finding one's true self, no matter what the world expects. For HSPs, this can be quite difficult, especially for men. Yet each character in this novel appears to be of this type especially the author who must be one himself
More from Psychology Today, "The Highly Sensitive Person has always been part of the human landscape. There's evidence that many creative types are highly sensitive, perceiving cultural currents long before they are manifest to the mainstream, able to take in the richness of small things others often miss.
This is an especially important book, take Fowles word on it, but also for those 20% (many who I imagine are readers) of the HSPs nature, it can be a revealing book which makes one feel less freaky, less out of touch, less isolated, especially in a time when nonfiction books such as Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking, are finally educating the public on who we are. Funny how this novel helped to "set the stage" in 1994.
Strong, complex and mysterious, Alice's Masque is a compelling story which circles in and around itself capturing the reader in a depth experience. Clarke's language is lush and mysterious, dressed in the harshness of the Cornish coastline. I read this insightful novel many years ago and it figures in the Top Ten books which changed my life deeply, I'm reading it again. Alice's Masque embraces the English fascination with the Middle Ages, knights and monks, ladies of queenly natures who, wise, by way of observation, when encountered, may summon a seeker to the inner quest, which proves more of a test than the outward journeys of the Crusades
And this was at the height of English post-modern fiction from the likes of Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, A.S. Byatt and more.
While Alice's Masque was first in the novels of transformation written by Clarke and has the same feel, it is in fact, quite a different story told in a different way. It starts with three women at the seaside in Yorkshire, in a wild and beautiful area and the theme harkens back to the concept of the Courts of Love from the Middle Ages, when women were to judge for crimes against the heart. Seventy year old Alice, a weaver and astrologer taught Medieval Studies at the university level before she shocked everyone her affair with a younger man so withdrew form society, first with her lover and then alone, where she becomes a well known artist and weaver. I won't say much more because I hate to reveal plots. As with movies, I want to be surprised at almost every curve and shift in a movie.
But I will say, this novel is quite different because as it's told from the viewpoint from Alice we have a rather unique perspective due to her age and experience. There are few boundaries in this novel, which can be cruel and brutal as often as it is touching and poignant. And the blur of boundaries often takes place between reality, dreams and active imagination.
It's odd that while reading this book, someone sent me a link to Psychology Today and there was an article on the Highly Sensitive Persons HSPs which has been researched a good bit over the past five or ten years. This is a rather new typology, a subset of the introvert with slightly different characteristics.
A the recent article, Time Magazine: "The Power of (Shyness)" and High Sensitivity
first published in Time and then reprinted in Psychology Today which referenced an earlier Psychology Today article, "Sense and Sensibility," from 1969 you can see the research has been going on for a while.
"Ernest Hartmann, a psychiatrist at Tufts University best known for his dream research. Around the same time, he was solidifying the concept of boundaries as a dimension of personality and way of experiencing the world. Life, he observes, is made up of boundaries—between past and present, you and me, subject and object. And people differ in the way they embody and perceive boundaries.
In his schema, people with thin mental boundaries do not clearly separate the contents of consciousness, so that a fantasy life of daydreaming may bump right up against everyday reality. It's as if those with thin boundaries have porous shells that allow more of their environment to penetrate and "get" to them—and into their dreams, Hartmann's concept of the thin-boundaried seemed to suggest that there indeed exists a group of people who take in a whole lot more than others.
Today, science is validating a group of people whose sensitivity surfaces in many domains of life. Attuned to subtleties of all kinds, they have a complex inner life and need time to process the constant flow of sensory data that is their inheritance.
Highly sensitive people are all around us. They make up about 20 percent of the population, and likely include equal numbers of men and women. All the available evidence suggests they are born and not made.
This description totally explains an elderly person of an HSPs nature.
And I can attest to that myself being one. All my life, I've been told to get my head out of the clouds (I was in a fantasy almost all day through school and then through much of my failed marriage) but now I see there was no way I could. It's just how I was genetically programmed from birth and further pushed by the death of my father when I was five. Once I started writing I mined that world on the other side of a very slim veil for poetry and novels but just within the past year, I've noticed my dream life now invades my awake life, without any active imagination on my own. Images just break through, more often when I'm alone, reading, but they have nothing to do with the subject matter of the book. It happens more often than not now, everyday and often I am able to participate in a dream and change it while I'm still asleep or half asleep. It's often hard to tell, they seem the same world at times.
Much of Alice's Masque is like this from the first shocking pivotal events, through a brutal crime on the beach, and a manhunt, to lovers testing, chasing, thwarting and hurting each other, when all they want to do is open up and be authentic. And there is one way, slowly revealed through a series of bizarre experiences and encounters. Ultimately its a story about finding one's true self, no matter what the world expects. For HSPs, this can be quite difficult, especially for men. Yet each character in this novel appears to be of this type especially the author who must be one himself
More from Psychology Today, "The Highly Sensitive Person has always been part of the human landscape. There's evidence that many creative types are highly sensitive, perceiving cultural currents long before they are manifest to the mainstream, able to take in the richness of small things others often miss.
This is an especially important book, take Fowles word on it, but also for those 20% (many who I imagine are readers) of the HSPs nature, it can be a revealing book which makes one feel less freaky, less out of touch, less isolated, especially in a time when nonfiction books such as Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking, are finally educating the public on who we are. Funny how this novel helped to "set the stage" in 1994.
June 27, 2018
This will work best for you if you've read Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale and maybe another mediaeval romance or two, especially Arthurian or Grail romances, maybe a bit of Spenser.
January 8, 2014
It started well with vivid portrayal of the Cornish coast, insightful psychological detail, and a compelling plot, but then it veered off into dreams and mythology and I lost heart and skimmed to end.
There was one delightful phrase (a malpropism) where an old woman advises her housekeeper not to "jump to confusion." I can't get it out of my mind and I chuckle with appreciation every time I think of it. I've been sharing with everyone I meet. It is good advice for many life situations.
There was one delightful phrase (a malpropism) where an old woman advises her housekeeper not to "jump to confusion." I can't get it out of my mind and I chuckle with appreciation every time I think of it. I've been sharing with everyone I meet. It is good advice for many life situations.
November 30, 2009
After reading 'The Chymical Wedding', I was expecting great things of this but was hugely disappointed. The characters did not inspire any empathy and, although the Cornish settings wrre lovely, there wassomething lacking in the story.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews