Reading Notes on The Beetle

Reading Notes: Richard Marsh, The Beetle
December 20-21, 2008. Transcribed from Twitter

Up a bit before dawn. Very snowy landscape with sky a cold blue. Got fire going. Reading Richard Marsh's Edwardian thriller "The Beetle." 7:27 AM Dec 20th, 2008 from txt

The Beetle's victim Robert Holt dehumanized on several registers: becoming an "automaton," an "invertibrate" and without will or volition. 8:11 AM Dec 20th, 2008 from txt

Holt also a sex object as The Beetle forces him to strip naked, admires his white skin, and implants a "blubbery" kiss that steals his soul 8:12 AM Dec 20th, 2008 from txt

Modern society represented by Lessingham, smooth politician with a secret in his past, and Atherton, blithe inventor of chemical weapons. 11:56 AM Dec 20th, 2008 from txt

Atherton displaces his murderousness from humans, killing his rival's cat and planning large scale test of nerve gas on Amazonian fauna. 12:50 PM Dec 20th, 2008 from txt

Rivalry of two kinds of magic: the Beetle's "survivor" arts of transmigration and mesmerism against Atherton's electrochemical science. 12:56 PM Dec 20th, 2008 from txt

Lessingham's cloudy past: "the man's a mushroom, a toadstool sprung up in the course of a single night, apparently out of some dirty ditch" 1:22 PM Dec 20th, 2008 from txt

"The Beetle": Faced with overwhelming evidence of the ineffible, it is so much the British way to densely cling to common sense. 9:33 AM Dec 21st, 2008 from txt

Debate in "The Beetle" on how much of his past a man must reveal; Atherton does not argue Lessingham's statement that "in all our lives there are episodes which we keep to ourselves." Both Holt and Lessingham pay for indiscretion of looking in a window. 11:08 AM Dec 21st, 2008 from txt

Detective as confessor. Lessingham opens up his sexual misadventure in Cairo: "I am altogether incapable of even hinting to you the nauseating nature of that woman's kisses ... I lay there like a log. She did with me as she would and in dumb agony I endured." 11:26 AM Dec 21st, 2008 from txt

Lessingham defines a Confidential Agent (Detective): "an experienced man of the world who has been endowed by nature with phenomenal perceptive abilities and in whose capacity and honor I can place the completest confidence." 12:39 PM Dec 21st, 2008 from txt

On ride-in from Hayward, H suggests Beetle's messy end in railway accident can be read as fate of ancient magic in face of modern technology 10:57 AM Dec 22nd, 2008 from web

At end of "The Beetle," Lessingham + Marjorie suffering from kind of proto-PTSD; strangely like the contemporary symptoms of child sex abuse 10:33 AM Dec 22nd, 2008 from web

Remarkably overt sexual tone of "The Beetle"; Marsh lacivious in insistence on nakedness and sadism as opposed to more allusive Stoker. 10:45 AM Dec 22nd, 2008 from web

In summing-up, suggestion that Egyptian den of the perversion cult is wiped out in British military raid; so Atherton's violence triumphs. 10:51 AM Dec 22nd, 2008 from web

"The Beetle" presages Anglo-American tendency to see sexuality as threatening and harmful (even evil) while violence is fun and patriotic 10:54 AM Dec 22nd, 2008 from web