Programming note: Join Steyn tomorrow, Saturday, for another edition of his Serenade Radio show, On the Town. This week's episode includes a surfeit of prostitutes, highlights from The Mrs O'Leary Songbook, and a glass-half-empty Sinatra Sextet. The fun starts at 5pm Greenwich Mean Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe/12 midday North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~Welcome to the sixty-eighth audio adventure in our series Tales for Our Time - and our first foray into the work of Robert Hugh Benson. Lord of the World is a far-sighted novel of 1907 looking ahead to the world of the early twenty-first century. Which is to say, right now.
As Mark notes in his introduction, no less a literary critic than Pope Francis says Lord of the World is "a bit heavy at the beginning", but you may instead marvel at how detailed is the author's vision of our time. For a chap writing in 1907, Mr Benson gets a lot of things right - including the rise of the east, the degeneration of western universities, the coming of a European parliament. On the other hand, he's a little ahead of the game on the US absorption of Canada:
Mr. Templeton stopped to cough again. Father Francis sighed and shifted in his chair.
"And America?" asked Percy.
"Ah! all that is very complicated. But she knew her strength and annexed Canada the same year. That was when we were at our weakest."
To hear Steyn read the first part of Lord of the World, prefaced by Mark's introduction to the work, Mark Steyn Club members should please click here and log-in.
~We continue to receive appreciative comments about our Christmas Tale for Our Time - Mark's own Plum Duff. Israel Pickholtz, an Israeli member of The Mark Steyn Club, says simply:
That was quite something!
Margaret Hughes, a Steyn Clubber from Wales, fleshes it out a bit:
Plum Duff: Poignant and powerful in equal measure.
From Paul Cathey in Colorado:
I have listened to this story many times since it first appeared in the TFOT. And since then there have been many more diversity puddings, offered by many more darlings of diversity, blowing Britons, and others, to smithereens, or their fellow darlings driving their diversity SUV's through Christmas markets, making diversity puddings out of those unlucky enough to be in their way. And still the mechanically rung Christmas bells are stuck on, '. . . the bell tolls, the bell tolls, the bell tolls, . . ..'
For a tale tossed off in a brief moment, its creativity rivals that of The Gift of the Magi by another writer. The Gift of the Mujahidin. Brilliant, Mark.
And one more, from Larry Durham, a South Carolina Steyn Clubber:
I've consumed Plum Duff several times now and each time I've chortled when you describe Carrie Moonbeams' identification by tattoo. However, the paragraphs that follow that discovery are heart wrenching and the latest 'automobile attack' make it even more so.
Thank you, Larry.
We have all kinds of tales in our archives, from the leisurely comedy of Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat to P G Wodehouse with a social conscience in Psmith, Journalist - oh, and some fusty notions of honour and duty in a certain other fellow's The Prisoner of Windsor. Tales for Our Time in all its variety is both highly relevant and a welcome detox from the madness of the hour: over seven-and-a-half years' worth of Steyn's audio adaptations of classic fiction starting with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's cracking tale of an early conflict between jihadists and westerners in The Tragedy of the Korosko. To access them all, please see our easy-to-navigate Netflix-style Tales for Our Time home page. We've introduced a similar tile format for Mark's Sunday Poems and also for our Hundred Years Ago Show.
We launched The Mark Steyn Club well over seven years ago, and we're overwhelmed by all those members across the globe who've signed up to be a part of it - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Cook County to the Cook Islands, West Virginia to the West Midlands. As Mark said at the time, membership isn't for everyone, but it is a way of ensuring that the bulk of our content remains available for everyone.
That said, we are offering our Club members a few extras, including our monthly audio adventures by Dickens, Conrad, Kafka, Gogol, Jane Austen, H G Wells, Louisa May Alcott, George Orwell, Baroness Orczy, Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Louis Stevenson - plus a handful of pieces of non-classic fiction by Steyn himself. You can find them all here. We're very pleased by the response to our Tales - and we even do them live occasionally, and sometimes with special guests on The Mark Steyn Cruise.
We are truly thrilled that one of the most popular of our Steyn Club extras these last seven-and-a-half years has been our nightly audio serials. If you've enjoyed them and you're looking for a present for a fellow fan of classic fiction, we hope you'll consider our special Club Gift Membership. Aside from Tales for Our Time, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
~The chance to engage in live Clubland Q&A sessions with Mark, such as this coming Wednesday's;
~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show and our other video content;
~Steyn's video series of classic poetry;
~Booking for special members-only events, such as The Mark Steyn Christmas Show, assuming he's ever again up to such demanding events;
~Advance booking for his live appearances around the world, assuming likewise;
~Customized email alerts for new content in your areas of interest;
~and the opportunity to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to Lord of the World but to all the other yarns gathered together at the Tales for Our Time home page.
One other benefit to membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, if you think Lord of the World is a bust, feel free to have at it.
And do join us tomorrow evening for Part Two of Robert Hugh Benson's visionary caper.
