I came to Antal Szerb through his novel Journey by Moonlight a couple of years ago. He was an Hungarian man of letters of Jewish descent who died in a concentration camp in 1945 at the age of 44. The Pendragon Legend is a very different novel to Journey by Moonlight, in so far as it purports to be a satirical take on the gothic novel, whereas the later novel is in many ways a much more conventional mid-European novel of the ’30s.
Both novels have strongly autobiographical content, although as the narrative of Pendragon proceeds, this becomes ever less important. While there are entertaining elements, this is certainly not in the same class as Journey by Moonlight. Characters are one-dimensional. There’s the noble but eccentric aristocrat, the beautiful but treacherous woman, the larger than life German matron figure, the porkie-pie telling Irishman and so forth; even the protagonist, in theory semi-autobiographical, is a bit of a cypher. Despite being a bone-dry scholar of occult and obscure texts he somehow gets mixed up in a centuries old mystery involving the Rosicrucians.
The plot feels forced and swerves from one clichéd location to the next, from one well-worn plot device to the next. Despite this, there’s obviously a keen reader of Conan-Doyle, Mary Shelly and Bram Stoker at work. The novel ultimately fails because it entirely abandons restraint as it nears its climax, turning what had been irony into a very silly and overblown pastiche.
It’s difficult to agree with The Daily Telegraph, whose unnamed critic is quoted as writing that ‘Szerb belongs with the master novelists of the twentieth century’. Proust, Kafka or Joyce he is not, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t also worth reading. But if you are going to read his books, I suggest you start with Journey by Moonlight rather than The Pendragon Legend.
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Comments
One Comment so far. Leave a comment below.I can’t keep myself from leaving a comment, however late, just to give Szerb his due. You conclude that the ‘Pendragon Legend’ is rather dispensable reading, and I can understand your reasons. This book comes from a different mold than ‘Journey by Moonlight’, indeed. It doesn’t have the psychological depth of that novel, nor it pretends to, but, in turn, it presents an entertaining formula (dime novel + cultural history) that made Umberto Eco and Dan Brown a worldwide success many decades later. And that is really something to acknowledge. Besides, if you had to deal with the Len Rix translation, your disappointment was granted. Being a native Hungarian, I had the chance to compare it with the original text, and I was simply scandalized. Whole passages ignored, all style, subtext and irony butchered out – the whole charm of it, really. Just like a Watteau snapped with a mobile. Maybe it’s not the translator to blame, but the publisher’s considerations for the DaVinci Code mob. Either way, it’s a shame. After all, it’s not by chance that generations of Hungarian readers love this book so much that they voted it into their top 25 favourite books of all time.