Knut: A novel

by Tom Mallin

Knut takes place during WWII in the house of the Strobls, a Norwegian aristocratic estate populated by leeching relatives, ruled by the loveless widow Madame Strobl. Sickly son and heir Knut writes of his early life in a confessional manuscript handed to his doting sister Katya, for whom he nurtures intolerable incestuous desires. Knut is a darkly comic take on the gothic novel told in a prose style that captures the tension, violence, and decay of its setting, and parodies its cast of beastly hangers-on and contemptuous aristocrats. A largely neglected artist and writer, Tom Mallin published five novels with Allison & Busby in the 1970s before his death to cancer 1977. This reprint and first paperback edition hopes to introduce new readers to his peculiar and original talent. Introduction by Rupert Mallin.

Genres: Fiction

240 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1971

About the author

Tom Mallin was born in the Black Country in 1927 and studied on scholarship at the Birmingham School of Art in 1943-1945. Upon returning from national service, Mallin studied at the Anglo-French Arts Centre in St. John’s Wood, and became interested in the ‘New Realist’ school of painting, popular in Paris at the time. He worked as a picture restorer for many years, and moved to stables in Suffolk, converted into an artist’s studio, in 1955 to raise his two children, meanwhile producing a significant body of artistic works, from lifesize sculptures to cartoons and paintings. Mallin began writing around this time, and completed his ambitious first novel, Erowina, in 1962 (published a decade later as his third). Mallin’s work was taken on by Allison & Busby in the early 1970s, and before his death to cancer in 1977, he published five novels: Dodecahedron, Knut, Erowina, Lobe and Bedrok, leaving behind many unpublished works. His play Curtains was also published around this time. Mallin’s works are striking and stifling acts of creative expression, and demonstrate a dark and fertile imagination often exploring the familiar bedfellows of sex, violence, and religion.

http://tmallin.blogspot.ie/

http://www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsM/m...

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mallin’s second novel is set in the crumbling mansion of a Norwegian aristocratic family in the 1920s, narrated by the unfortunate Knut—a sickly child despised and emasculated by his mother, who develops an infatuation for his sister. The style mimics the Victorian dramatics of vintage crumbling aristo novels (see Mauriac, Balzac, Zola), with light structural experimentation (the second and longest part consists of the ‘manuscript’ Knut is scribbling for his sister, and us). A claustrophobic and grotesque tone pervades—Knut’s family are typically waspish and poisonous aristo “eccentrics,” and his struggle for affection among servants and sister provides the kernel of the action—building to that incestuous torture promised in the first sentence of this review. In Mallin’s next novel, Erowina, he changes tack entirely, experimenting with various complex narrative modes, abandoning this “throwback” prose style for even more impressive feats of immense imagery and metaphorking. This novel is more emotionally engaging and devastating in a less painful manner than Dodecahedron—his harsh and violent debut—and opens up a warmer and more enriching dimension to Mallin’s otherwise quite airless, tormented, and bleak vision.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

The decades-long decadence of a once-aristocratic family.

Following the formalist determinism of the tragedy in Dodecahedron, Mallin turned back to a looser a structure and greater sentiment. Here emotions (mostly despair, self-immolation, and unrequited and illicit love) rule, driving the action into its various hazards and plummets until a final inevitable arrangement is reached. Never one to entirely forgo meta-structural play, the book begins and ends in ironic palindrome, though the actual content of the book calls any suggestion of happiness thoroughly into question (as well as the particulars of a taunting moment deliberately stranded outside any hope of a place within the continuity). As the text was composed by one of the characters, however, perhaps such inconsistancies are entirely to be expected.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this back when I was about 17 or 18, and remember little about it - only that it unsettled me, like a creepy film, and I remember that feeling more than I do anything about the plot or characters. Now, you might ask "where's the pleasure in that?, but it takes a great deal of skill to evoke strong feelings like that with just 'words'. Tom Mallin was my first influence in the unrealised dream to be a writer myself. Truth is, I can't write as well as that.

But I still have that book, packed in a box somewhere, and I will find it and re-read it one day with my 50 year old head on, just to see if it 'feels' the same.

[🐴 🍖]

funnily enough the big juicy hook here (knut the narrator's ~*~incestuous desire~*~ for his sister) was actually kinda ho-hum for me in comparison to the day-to-day of this sickly kid's life in the norwegian equivalent of grey gardens... really excels in painting a sensory picture of, e.g., itchy mittens worn with goose-fat ointment, or the fear that the veil will blow off his aunt's cancer-ridden face as she gobbles turkish delights... a little bit proustian i guess, though proust had fewer horses drowning in mud

[Steph G.]

Have not read any of this author’s books, though I would like to. None of his books are available on kindle or Gutenberg, etc. that I can find.