Journeys Beyond Advice by Rhys Hughes

Reviewed by William P. Simmons

Sarob Press, 2002
211 pgs
Price: $45.00

A weaver of neither daydream or nightmare, fantasy or realism, Welsh author Rhys Hughes is a revisionist of the absurdist school of writing which also included to varying degrees such influential authors as Samuel Beckett, Pirandello, August Strindberg, and other artists at odds with traditional literary forms of realism, tragedy, and formal supernatural/fantasy fiction. In his newest collection, Journeys Beyond Advice, Hughes displays what appears to be a lack of interest in traditional monomorphic narrative and instead displays a passion for fragmented attacks against expectation, preferring to deal with his world of personalized unique ideas in a form devoted more to impressions and emotional overflow than in prescribed notions of literary structure. In this collection Hughes evokes meaning through carefully constructed NON-SENSE – used here not in its negative sense but as a term employed to convey the author’s employment of the impossible and illogical to arrive at conclusions and characters beyond, as the title suggests, the expected.

Such stories as the unsettling "A World Beyond The Stairwell" creates through an explosion of emotions, ideas, and experimental narrative structure a literature paradoxically belonging to yet beyond pre-conceived notions of genre. A fabulist in love with words, symbolic meaning, and the process by which they are capable of subverting the expectations of generations weaned on the limiting dictates of modern minimalist theory, Hughes’s sly and often hilarious anti-fictions bleed with philosophical insight, tragedy, and a sense of surrealism openly challenging the conventionalities of the fantasy genre within which he is most often placed. Hughes, a renegade word smith throwing mad puns and delightfully insane images into contexts that make the ridiculous seem more credible than objective reasoning, delights in seeing too far too deep, relying heavily upon description because it is the only possible way in which he can hope to lend recognizable shape into his complex, multi-faceted ideas.

Rightfully compared with Italo Calvino (and to my mind, Pirandello) Hughes’s revisionist dreamscapes explore taunting territories of the human heart and mind, challenging the properties of space, time, and conservative thought. The very acts of interpretation and creation are central themes to this new Sarob Press collection, as well as the needed but often flawed tool of perception, itself a subjective territory of fear and illusion. Hughes recognizes writing as an artificial artifact – a process to undergo for its own sake – an approach to the arts largely resisted by a large portion of the Western world, which frowns against "art for its own sake" in its desperate search for a so-called literary realism upon which to hang its narrow approach to life, art, and philosophy.

The thematic freshness and bizarre construction of the tales in Journeys Beyond Advice hint of a mathematically complex composition, the brazen grandiosity of its author similar to the ambitions of his earnest, mad, divinely adventurous characters, each of whom is struggling to understand the universe and their subsequent place or displacement within it. Evocative prose and satirical humor drive home the force of Hughes’s unconventional celebrations of apprehension, journey, and transformation. Change and flow, vision and revision – each characterize the pieces in Journeys Beyond Advice. It appears that the author indeed succeeded in crafting a book that he himself would enjoy reading, "the sort of an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic" that entertains while threatening (or is that promising?) to overthrow the sequential pattern in which we observe our world and ourselves. A wonderful feat, a worthwhile book!

Holding a Cum Laude Honors Degree in English from Suco college at Oneonta, William P. Simmons is a 28-year-old author, poet, editor, reviewer, and journalist specializing in dark and fantastic fiction.

As a journalist, William has spoken with some of the finest authors in the speculative field, including Ramsey Campbell, Graham Masterton, Ramsey Campbell and Barry Hoffman.

His first collection of short fiction, Becoming October, is now available from the award winning Flesh&Blood Press.

William lives in the North County with his wife, Valarie, and daughter, Bonnie Lee Simmons.

Copyright 2003 by William P. Simmons