Faust

FAUST being the Historia Von D. Johann Fausten dem wietbeschreyen Zauberer und Schwartzkunstler, or History of Dr John Faust the notorious Magician and Necromancer, as written by his familiar servant and disciple Christopher wagner, now for the first time Englished from the Low German. Dr John Faust. The man who sold his soul to the Devil. A mythical figure? Not at all. There was a real Faust, historically documented, and every known fact about him plays its part in this novel. But the result is more than a history. Much more. In a Tower halfway up a mountain in the Black Forest, John Faust, a diabolist and drunkard, is expecting a visit from the Devil.It is Ash Wednesday,1540, and Faust has just forty days left before the delivery date on his soul falls due. The Doctor has companions in his Tower. Helen of Troy, of course.Seven lovely young girls, each one with a different erotic speciality. A certain grey friar, Mephistopheles, although only Faust seems to see him.A monkey called Ackercocke.And, last but not least, there is Faust's young disciple, Kit Wagner. It is Wagner who tells us the story of those last forty days, with hardly a pause to draw breath.Slangy, sceptical, rude, Wagner's view of Faust is absolutely modern: 'I'm not telling lies and legends.I'm not trying to compete in the tall story business. I'm talking about a man so real you can smell him through oak doors five inches thick.So let's stick to facts.Believe me, the facts about Faust are stranger by far than the fictions.' One fact seems reasonably certain.Good Friday,1540 - which happens to fall on a Friday the 13th - will be unlucky for some.The devil come. And Faustus must be damned. Or will he? And must he? For this is not a John Faust content to sit lamenting and waiting for the clock to strike twelve for his summons to hell.He has Other Ideas.The Other Ideas take us on a pilgrimage over the Alps, down through Italy where maps aren't much use when two men, eight girls, and a monkey are in hot pursuit of a black dog called Satan who is heading for Rome and the Pope. The tight and exciting plot, packed with twists and turns, marks a new development in Robert Nye's work, and makes this maybe his best book to date (then 1980). A supernatural thriller which is also a very human comedy. Published in 1980, the book coincides with the 500th birthday of the figure who gave rise to the legends first collected in the anonymous German Faust-book of 1587, which inspired Marlowe's The Tragicall History of Dr Faustus (1604), and later treatments of the same theme by Goethe and Thomas Mann.


Genre: General Fiction