Navarth

Navarth, generally referred to as 'the mad poet', is a character in The Palace of Love (pub. 1967), the third of the Demon Princes novels by Jack Vance, though his writings are occasionally referred to in other, unrelated novels by Vance (eg Araminta Station). Navarth in person appears more eccentric than mad, a Salvador Dali-ish petulant extrovert and creator of 'happenings', one of the more amiable in a long line of Vance's self-absorbed egotists. We first encounter him on Earth, old and forgotten, living in reduced circumstances on a canal-boat in the ancient (but fictitious) city of Rollingshaven: apparently a Vanceian conflation of Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg. The chief protagonist of the novel-sequence, Kirth Gersen, induces Navarth to help him in his quest to find the galactic master criminal Viole Falushe (with whom Navarth was long ago involved when the criminal was merely the schoolboy Vogel Filschner), and the pair eventually travel through space to Falushe?s notorious ?Palace of Love? (it proves a chaste enough place) in the far Beyond. The most extended example of Navarth's verse that is presented to the reader, the bouncily sinister ballad 'Tim R. Mortiss', is a rather fetching absurdist reworking of the 'Lament for the Makars' by the 15th-century Scottish poet William Dunbar.

Related Topics:
Demon Princes - Jack Vance - Salvador Dali - Rotterdam - Antwerp - Hamburg - William Dunbar

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~