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A Crystal Age, by William Hudson
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The book presents an almost utopian society where man lives in peace and harmony. The young protagonist is transported into the future where he has difficulty in coming to grips with reality. A narrative that captures the imagination and strikes a crucial balance between the author's desires of a dystopian future society and reality.
- Published on: 2012-06-14
- Released on: 2006-10-01
- Format: Large Print
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 10.00" h x .55" w x 7.75" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 364 pages
About the Author
William Henry Hudson (1841 - 1922), author, naturalist, and ornithologist, was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina to American parents. He spent his early years studying the local flora and fauna on the Argentine pampas and then settled in England in the early1870s. Hudson's most famous novel isGreen Mansions(1904), an exotic romance about a traveler who encounters a woman named Rima in the Guyana jungle of southeastern Venezuela. His other works includeThe Purple Land(1885) andFar Away and Long Ago (1918).
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
An irritating Rip Van Winkle romance
By Karl Janssen
A Crystal Age, published in 1887, is a utopian science fiction novel by English author W. H. Hudson. I hesitate to use those adjectives in describing the book, however, because it barely qualifies as either. The book reads like a tepid, watered-down ripoff of William Morris’s novel News from Nowhere, and Hudson even acknowledges the similarities in his preface to the 1906 edition. It turns out, however, that Hudson’s book preceded Morris’s by three years, so the former deserves credit for that. Wikipedia states that A Crystal Age “has been called a ‘significant S-F milestone.’” I don’t know who would call it that, however, because it is vastly inferior to News from Nowhere and just about any other utopian or dystopian novel I’ve ever read. Regardless of what influence it may have had on the genre, A Crystal Age is merely a baby step towards futurism and suffers from being too deeply rooted in the histrionic romantic literature of the past.
The story is narrated by a man named Smith. While out hiking the English countryside, he stumbles off a cliff and is knocked unconscious. When he comes to, he is covered in earth and entwined in tree roots. After digging himself out he discovers that the world he has awoken to is very different from the one he fell down in. At first, Smith doesn’t comprehend what has happened, but the reader recognizes that, much like the fairy tale of Rip Van Winkle, Smith has been asleep for a long time indeed. The sylvan landscape in which he now finds himself is largely uninhabited, but he soon encounters a party strolling in the woods, engaged in an apparent funeral procession. These beautifully dressed strangers gaze in horror at Smith’s antiquated and dirt-covered garments, and they are equally disturbed by his attempts at conversation. Although they speak the English language, they have no comprehension of words like “England,” “city,” or “money,” and do not recognize the names of any of a long list of historical personages. Though they suspect Smith may be insane, they recognize a traveler in need and invite him to accompany them back to their home. This fish-out-of-water scenario is humorous at first, but it becomes annoying as it goes on for half the book. The others’ take so much offense at everything Smith says, they come across as a bunch of annoying, puritanical pricks.
Smith is taken to a mansion which seems to function as an independent city state. One patriarchal couple governs over this domain, and the mother is worshipped as a goddess. Unlike Morris’s novel, which contemplates in great detail the social conditions of a future world, this is about the extent of Hudson’s utopian thought. The world depicted has a vaguely Pre-Raphaelite vibe, and only serves as background to a plot about Smith chasing after a 15-year-old girl. To be fair, the narrator is only 21, but his pursuit of the fair Yoletta borders on stalking. Despite all his waxing poetic about the nature of love, it’s clear his attraction towards her is purely physical. Much to his chagrin, her world does not comprehend romantic love, only a sort of universal brotherhood and affection, which makes his task more difficult. He soon realizes that to win the girl he must win over the mother, so he sets about kissing up to the matriarch.
Smith doesn’t even seem to realize that he’s been transported to the future. Only in the final two chapters is there any degree of philosophical reflection on mankind’s present or future existence. I enjoy 19th-century literature and utopian novels of all stripes. Even by the standards of its day, however, A Crystal Age is merely a dull, pedestrian love story, and 21st-century readers will learn little from it. News from Nowhere is no masterpiece either, but it’s a lot better than this.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By jp
great
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
This is worth a second read - probably more.....
By A. G. Plumb
The pastoral nature of this novel is such a disguise for it ends with the toughest, grittiest and most challenging ending I have ever read (stronger than Kafka's 'The Trial', or Christopher Priest's 'The Separation'). As a human being facing what we all face this ending is truly awful.
But what is Hudson telling us in this novel? Is it a Victorian approach to telling things that are otherwise inexpressible - that affection is not enough? That real love with all its manifestations must be honoured, because without it there is only death?
Here I find a challenge to psychoanalysis and all the techniques of psychology: 'I only discovered, what others have discovered before me, that the practice of introspection has a corrosive effect on the mind, which only serves to aggravate the malady it is intended to cure.' (If only I could stop introspection ......!) ) [page 279 Dutton edition of 1917]
But here the common man, Smith, plunged into this affectionate pastoral society, bemoans what he has just learned - that the young woman he loves can never love him as he wishes - 'I wish that I had never made that fatal discovery, that I might have continued still hoping and dreaming, and wearing out my heart with striving after the impossible, since any fate would have been preferable to the blank desolation which now confronted me.' [page 303-304 of the same edition]
I wonder what woman of Hudson's acquaintance he had to put aside with such enormous regret that he expressed these words!
Search this book out. Absorb its gentle fantasy and hold tight for a rough ending.
Other recommendations:
The Separation - Christopher Priest
The Trial - Franz Kafka
The Shepherd's Life - W H Hudson
Green Mansions - W H Hudson
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