The Twilight of the Vilp

by Paul Ableman

The hero of Paul Ableman's Vilp (1962) is Clive Witt, a novelist in search of a hero for his new novel. He advertises for suitable applicants, and from seventy-three replies he selects three: Professor Guthrie Pidge, a zoologist; Pad Dee Murphy, an Irish-Burmese peasant; and Harry Glebe, the inventor of the renowned earth-borer.

Clive's novel, though, progresses slowly. His three heroes refuse to mix their very disparate elements into a harmonious whole. Eventually, Clive scraps it and harnesses his team of heroes to a new work, an exciting science fiction tale called The Silver Spores. In this, mankind meets the Vilp! The novel ends with the 5,000 strong Vilp Galactic Council communing in space at an incredibly high telepathic level.

'Excellent... vital, taut, brilliantly imaginative' Anthony Burgess

140 pages, ebook

First published February 1, 1969

About the author

Paul Ableman was an English playwright and novelist. He wrote an eclectic mix of literary novels, erotic fiction, television novelizations, and non-fiction.

Ableman was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, into a Jewish family, and brought up mainly in New York. He later settled in Hampstead, London. His father was a tailor and his mother was a small-time actress.

Ableman was married twice, first to Tina Carrs-Brown in 1958; then to Sheila Hutton-Fox in 1978 until his death in 2006.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 1 out of 5]

Paul Ableman has been included among the small band of British experimental writers who were pushing the boundaries of the novel in the 1960s (Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1980)....but judging by The Twilight of the Vilp, he was pushing in the wrong direction.

The book is undoubtedly metafictional, featuring a novelist who advertises for suitable characters, selects three applicants, and makes several abortive attempts to weave them into a narrative. As a structure, this sounds fine. The only problem is the words. The Twilight of the Vilp is surreal, but at the slapstick end of surreality. I should have been warned by the fell word “hilarious” on the cover.

Open it at random and we have: “In twelfth-century China life was good. Each family had its own patch of ferns and none of the ferns drank whisky. There was an elected parliament and it was known as the parliament of ferns. Each fern in this parliament was called Colin.” And so on, and so on, and so on.

Perhaps if I’d been a teenager in the 1960s and read it when it was new, The Twilight of the Vilp might have seemed refreshingly anarchic and even “hilarious”. But not now. Paul Ableman went on to write tv tie-ins for Dad’s Army and the like. I suspect they might be better than this novel. Pretty much anything would be.

[Warren Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Totally bonkers book in a similar vein to John Sladek's work.

[D J Rout · Rating 3 out of 5]

One or two good gags but not as comedically brilliant as the blurbs would have you think.

[Geoff Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back in my late teens, my dad, seeing I was into science fiction, and I imagine wanting to expand my literary horizons, recommended “The Twilight of the Vilp” to me. “The Twilight of the Vilp”, it needs to be said, is not a genre SF book, but a comic surrealist fiction about the art of writing fiction.

“The Twilight of the Vilp” is great fun: mostly lovely, whimsical, at times laugh-out-loud, frequently surreal. If ease of reading is a measure of quality of writing, this is a well written book, the paragraphs and pages slipping by without hindrance.

The premise, generally of characters in fiction being or becoming independent of their creators, and in this book, of a fiction writer needing to recruit in the real world at least the central character of their new novel, puts it in the frame with metafiction like Flann O’Brien’s wonderful “At Swim Two Birds” (1936).

The character of the central character, the nominal author, “Paul Ableman”, is key to the tenor of the book. Framing this Paul Ableman as an absent-minded / forgetful and procrastinating literary type enables a surreal stream of surprises for the narrator, relating to identity, to weave in and out of the narrative, such as, notably, vagueness as to the number and names of his children. This “Paul Ableman” is an unreliable narrator par excellence.

I remember loving “The Twilight of the Vilp” when I first read it, and without re-reading it myself – it has been hard to obtain and rather expensive to purchase – have since sought it out as an alternative kind of gift for people who already have pretty much everything they need and want. So I was happy to find a recent Faber Finds edition available for a reasonable price for myself to re-read.

Re-reading the book now, after perhaps 50 years, I was surprised – actually disturbed – to encounter two offensive inclusions. One was the use of a historical now offensive racial label for black people (just a few years after the publication of “The Twilight of the Vilp”, 1969, the term came to be considered offensive by the majority of people in the USA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negro), along with use of racist stereotyping of an African American railway worker, tongue-in-cheek but still offensive. The other offensive content is the inclusion of what appears to be a three-way sex act between the narrator, a mature academic (a professor) and a seemingly vulnerable young student, and worse, the encouragement of sex between a relatively random adult male (a visiting telephone engineer) and two underage girls (the narrator’s daughters), resulting in pregnancies and babies. I mean, it is all done for laughs, and maybe it is a satire on the permissive ‘60s culture, but it doesn’t sit well with the reader in 2024.

Side note:

At an anti-racist organising meeting a few years back, I was surprised to learn that the British secondary school teenagers in the meeting were in agreement that John Steinbeck’s novella “Of Mice and Men” (1937) crossed the line in language and tropes used to depict a black African American character, and therefore the book deserved condemnation and rejection. “Of Mice and Men” is included in the American Library Association’s list of the top 100 most banned and challenged books https://www.ala.org/news/2020/09/ala-.... I haven’t read the book in its entirety for a long time, but am inclined to think that Steinbeck, like Woody Guthrie (in his autobiography, “Bound for Glory”, 1943), was himself anti-racist. There is a note in his biography in Wikipedia that seems to support that view: “[Steinbeck] requested that his name be removed from the credits of Lifeboat, because he believed the final version of the film had racist undertones.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_St....

Study material that includes divisive racist slurs is obviously something that requires extremely careful handling, if used at all. Personally, I used an edited version – actually, a small set of key short extracts with bridging plot summarising texts I guess I myself provided – of “Of Mice and Men” that to my recollection included no racist slurs, which was why I was surprised by the school kids’ response. In my English language classes, with classes of adult international students of various nationalities at higher levels, I used to use episodes of the TV comedy Fawlty Towers, but never the episode titled “The Germans”, which would be extremely counter-productive in its impact. Another teacher once did use it, at the explicit request of his (adult) German students. The German students were so shocked they went to the course director and complained.

[STU · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just a bizarre book.
Like when you can remember a dream which just jumps from scene to scene with no apparent connection.
The fact it was only 140 pages made me able to complete it.

[Francesco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fucking bonkers.