Barbarians
1917
Barbarians
1917
The year is 1917. Three men flee America aboard a mule transport ship, each running from a different ghost. Carfax, a soldier of fortune with blood on his hands; Harry Stent, an affluent adventurer whose wealth has purchased nothing but emptiness; and Jacques Wayland, a writer whose war wounds cut deeper than the physical. They are barbarians in a world that has suddenly made savagery respectable, men out of step with both the jingoistic home front and the mechanistic slaughter of the trenches. Chambers, better known for the dreamlike terrors of The King in Yellow, brings his gift for atmospheric unease to this quieter, bitter meditation. What emerges is a novel about men untethered from the civilization they once believed in, searching for meaning in an age that has abandoned the very concept. It captures a specific moment of disillusionment, that peculiar restlessness of a generation asking what humanity means when war has stripped it bare.
Editions
X-Ray
“The Luxembourg is within five minutes’ walk of the rue Notre Dame des Champs, and there he sat under the shadow of a winged god, and there he had sat for an hour, poking holes in the dust and watching the steps which lead from the northern terrace to the fountain. The sun hung, a purple globe, above the misty hills of Meudon. Long streamers of clouds touched with rose swept low on the western sky, and the dome of the distant Invalides burned like an opal through the haze. Behind the Palace the smoke from a high chimney mounted straight into the air, purple until it crossed the sun, where it changed to a bar of smouldering fire. High above the darkening foliage of the chestnuts the twin towers of St. Sulpice rose, an ever-deepening silhouette.””
— Robert W. Chambers
“It is easy,” they grumbled, “to crush those insurgents. One regiment of the Line and horses to drag away the cannon would do it; manifestos and placards won’t.” This was true. At that late hour, it would still have been easy to quell the insurrection. The insurgents were fatigued, enervated, confused. Discipline was almost entirely wanting.””
— Robert W. Chambers
