Sir Arthur
Ronald Fraser wrote twenty seven novels and a few other
miscellaneous books. He was a career diplomat, serving in
Argentina , France and Egypt and was knighted in 1949 in
recognition of a distinguished career.
Many of his
novels are tinged with mystical fantasy, illumined by Fraser’s
deeply-held conviction that there is an order of reality superior
to our familiar daily existence. His inspiration is drawn to some
extent from Chinese spirituality, most notable in his early novel
Landscape With
Figures,
about a Taoist Shangri-La of immortal sages: but more usually this
is interpreted through very English characters and settings.
In
The Flying
Draper (1924)
and The Fiery
Gate (1943),
he projects his visionary ideas through the character of the man
in the street: a draper and a grocer respectively receive
extraordinary powers which lead to some comparisons with the
scientific romances of H.G. Wells. But these works are not typical
of Fraser. His most distinctive and memorable book is surely
Flower
Phantoms
(1926) in which a fey art-deco girl who works in Kew Gardens finds
that her spiritual yearnings lead to a passionate mystic communion
with an orchid. The exquisite prose, all redolent of the hothouses
and their exotic occupants, is a remarkable experience in itself,
but the hints of higher realms of consciousness also have a
rarefied interest. A slightly more earthbound return to a similar
theme - a young woman’s spiritual awakening - is found in the
novel which achieved the most acclaim in his lifetime,
Rose
Anstey
(1930), in which the eponymous gamine’s pantheistic explorations
are set against the backdrop of an unconventional household .
Again, a young woman’s defiance of convention and ardent
identification with the things of the spirit are proclaimed in
Miss
Lucifer
(1939). It is these works, with their celebration of the
liberation of the feminine psyche, which are at the heart of
Fraser’s vision. He later wrote a planetary trilogy with a butler,
Trout, as its main character, encountering strange beings and
landscapes. A
Work of Imagination (Colin Smythe, 1974) is a spiritual meditation in
prose poem form.
Mark
Valentine
Novels
The
Flying Draper, T.F. Unwin (London), 1924
Landscape
With Figures,
Fisher Unwin (London), 1925
(revised
edition, Cape (London), 1952)
Flower
Phantoms,
Jonathan Cape (London), 1926
Rose
Anstey,
Jonathan Cape (London), 1930
Miss
Lucifer,
Jonathan Cape (London), 1939
The Fiery
Gate,
Jonathan Cape (London), 1943
A Visit
from Venus,
Jonathan Cape (London), 1958
Jupiter
in the Chair,
Jonathan Cape (London), 1958
Trout’s
Testament,
Jonathan Cape (London), 1959
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