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The Automaton
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 11, 2018
Loved this unusual little story about a man who falls in love with a chess-playing automaton. The first-person account is framed as having been found among 'the effects of a British infantryman who fell in the Third Battle of the Aisne, May, 1918'. The narrator, William Bradney, lives with his parents in an ailing Somerset theatre, the Comedy. The Automaton – 'a slim waxwork woman seated at a desk' – arrives along with the 'impresario', who calls his creation 'Madame' and fawns over her in a disturbingly mocking fashion. The Automaton's trick is the ability to win any game of chess, even against the most talented opponent. As William observes her distinctly non-mechanical movements, her 'fluid deliberation', he becomes increasingly obsessed, and one night he sneaks into the auditorium after dark to challenge her to a game himself...
It's all very uncanny, but what intrigued me most was the section that comes before all this, about William visiting his landlord's country house and meeting the housekeeper. It seems to have almost nothing to do with the rest of the plot. Does William's encounter with Mrs Lisle, particularly his fixation with her hand, foreshadow his later preoccupation with the dexterous Automaton? Are Elizabeth's leg splints an allusion to the blurred distinctions between (wo)man and machine in this story? If we are being told something about the way William perceives women, does it follow (since we only have his point of view) that the Automaton is not really an automaton? I'm still not sure, and the fact that such a short story made me consider so many possibilities is, I think, a testament to its many layered nuances.
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It's all very uncanny, but what intrigued me most was the section that comes before all this, about William visiting his landlord's country house and meeting the housekeeper. It seems to have almost nothing to do with the rest of the plot. Does William's encounter with Mrs Lisle, particularly his fixation with her hand, foreshadow his later preoccupation with the dexterous Automaton? Are Elizabeth's leg splints an allusion to the blurred distinctions between (wo)man and machine in this story? If we are being told something about the way William perceives women, does it follow (since we only have his point of view) that the Automaton is not really an automaton? I'm still not sure, and the fact that such a short story made me consider so many possibilities is, I think, a testament to its many layered nuances.
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January 14, 2021
“‘Oh! Your hair! You need a hand-maid to brush it!’ said the impresario in his soft voice. ‘But please, Madame, make do with me.'”
The narrator is boy or youth, son of the theatre’s caretaker, a theatre called the Comedy, a name that somehow ironically is the perfect early 20th century name for the era that surrounds it (with the poignant irony I now transmute, as a result, into a re-interpretation of the de Curzon story’s attitude towards the sexual or social mores of its era as my own sort of artful literary chess perdu) – a world, here, almost steampunk, where the narrator is a go-between for messages addressed from social class to social class, from well-bred to pawn or peon. But, question, who reaps the benefit of businesses to which the pawns contribute more than the King or Queen, only to be decimated by the collateral checkmate of the Great War? The Automaton herself is entrancing and life-like beyond the fiction that here creates her. Anxious and fulfilling for future’s hindsight reader. Another stylish, deeply atmospheric work to match against the powers of preternatural fiction equally presented by similar methodical moves, instrument by instrument, in the de Curzon.
Perdus and zugzwangs set as mines.
The narrator is boy or youth, son of the theatre’s caretaker, a theatre called the Comedy, a name that somehow ironically is the perfect early 20th century name for the era that surrounds it (with the poignant irony I now transmute, as a result, into a re-interpretation of the de Curzon story’s attitude towards the sexual or social mores of its era as my own sort of artful literary chess perdu) – a world, here, almost steampunk, where the narrator is a go-between for messages addressed from social class to social class, from well-bred to pawn or peon. But, question, who reaps the benefit of businesses to which the pawns contribute more than the King or Queen, only to be decimated by the collateral checkmate of the Great War? The Automaton herself is entrancing and life-like beyond the fiction that here creates her. Anxious and fulfilling for future’s hindsight reader. Another stylish, deeply atmospheric work to match against the powers of preternatural fiction equally presented by similar methodical moves, instrument by instrument, in the de Curzon.
Perdus and zugzwangs set as mines.
February 17, 2026
[Nightjar Press] (May 2017). SB. First Edition. 8/200. Signed. 19 Pages. Purchased from cold Tonnage Books.
Disjointed. Strange. Enigmatic. Atmospheric.
David Wheldon (1950-2021) was a superb writer and thanks are due to the Nightjar Press for making some of his work available.
Disjointed. Strange. Enigmatic. Atmospheric.
David Wheldon (1950-2021) was a superb writer and thanks are due to the Nightjar Press for making some of his work available.
July 18, 2019
A lovely, haunting short story with enough implied back story for a trilogy.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews