Bøker av John Fraser

John Fraser latest novel is about Life: - mysteries and chance, how it seems impossible to make a philosophy from a mixture of what is determinate and universal, and what is invention and potential - and then, how to botch up some plan for living in this uncertainty, cf. Petronius a celebrated author with no book extant, debauché, fine administrator, accused of treachery, forced to commit suicide by Nero.Every human has an ancestry that goes way back - to Creation? Very far, at any rate. The protagonist's name, Petronia, recalls that of the old Roman Petronius - he of the banquets and orgies, trusted administrator, forced to commit suicide by Nero on fake charges of treachery. Author of a book of satires never found, maybe never written. Petronia has no link with him, that life, but modern life affords its parallels. So, why do things happen? Some good, some bad - how and why? A mysterious voyage is offered, taken on the spur: what lies beneath? How, afterwards, to live, to make more voyages, penetrate more mysteries and one's part in them? Plots and spying, manipulative friends and their catastrophies, abundant disappearances and all-too-evident deaths - enmesh her deeper and reluctantly in a grandiose scheme to partition the world - wars and consolidations - on, even to the universe. The prospect is alarming. She twists and turns - there are orgies, the underground, the upward climb - everything to find out why? Why does it happen, what does it signify, where does her feeble contribution come in? She's lucky. Much of the mystery is given an explanation. The more she knows, the deeper the mystery becomes...

Think Zen and the Art of Spending the Night in a Haunted House, a celebration of the dream of finding something undiscovered and different.

Everyone is a part-time person. They do one thing while imagining being elsewhere, or being a lover, worker, fan - of something - or in some other life. We hope for a resolution, a better place, where the bad parts can be discarded, the good ones realised. In PARADISE, we are plunged into ever-deeper contradictions, separations: by nature a deserter, a pacifist, Harri is enrolled, becomes a soldier - becomes literally someone else. As a batman, he can fly - along with his superiors, with lovers who fly higher, outdistance him or, fatally, hit the ground.After many adventures, Harri finds himself in the midst of a squalid conflict. He is adviser, but also mediator. Making peace is advantageous: economically, there's the re-build. Politically, there's prestige for the new leaders. The ploy of war can be made profitable. Unfortunately - he has no ambition, whereas his temporary partners have an excess of it. In the end, he witnesses the magic inherent in humanity, which leads it to destruction, or to mediocrity. Paradise lost, or indefinitely postponed?

TRUE STORIES - three stories of modern life by John Fraser.True Stories poses the question: What is modern life? Struggling with bureaucracy, getting on, and off, lists? The protagonist, Kochi, and his young - then much older - friends, engage with love, philosophy ... the murder of a lover by the mother of a socialite, the centre of the hero's attention: and her reprisal. We follow them, their adventures, the search for the Great Principle, embodied by a fragile ancient, who dosses down and dies on his first night in Kochi's dwelling.Think, says the Master, but no life seems lived by Thinking. There are wildfires, concealed well-shafts, a flight by sea: happenstance determined histories. Eventually, in a declining night-club, the protagonist finds clues, a divan to sleep on, even work. All human knowledge is examined by Kochi and his new partner, the dancer, Jahan. Knowledge at last? Maybe ... The hero, Kochi, leaves by night, seeking a new adventure.Clap Your Hands traces the search for a relationship, taking us from a truncated marriage to Russia, passing through Trabzon in Turkey - the hero caged and dispatched like an exotic bird, and ending in refuge on the Danube's mouth.Smoke addresses the end of life - the narrator's, recalling his youth and his first objectives, the goals to be reached, the satisfaction to be enjoyed - entrusted to him by a sailor in a bar. The ends of life seem trivial, when you reach them - like the end of life itself. His end of life is bitter, though sometimes he remembers sweetness ... It's lived with the dissatisfied, the clueless, and the cheats ... and sadness prevails.

Mercenaries - four new tales by John FraserMercenaries: soldiers of fortune, conottieri, knight errants ... Soldiers have always been paid, somehow; a wage? ... or by their own practices of looting, enslavement, often taking it out on others for vengeance or pleasure, taking prisoners and ransoming - hostages. Yet people who soldier for the money are singled out, and looked down on ... and yet, however you do it, losing, whether done for money or the cause, is never pleasant. Being a prisoner, or dead, gives no material credit whether you are a courageous, altruistic type or needy and conscripted. Now, with people's wars, mass invasions and generalised hostilities - everyone is a soldier. At least, everybody suffers like a soldier, not all bear arms. Many are also mercenaries - have been, would like to be. They are like samurai, who cut the personal risk by doing deals with similars - momentarily, the enemy. Mercenaries concerns attempts by mercenaries to engage more mercenaries to carry out humanitarian work. Maybe it ought to work. It should be clean. What can be accomplished, tying political aims to cash? Suppose the aims are impeccable.... The short concluding pieces, Round Heaven, Square Earth, Hope and Stop, are illustrations of how political schemes might be achieved by force of will, without the cash. All our modern realities, and their dilemmas, are treated here.

The Beach consists of two new tales from John Fraser What is a human life worth? If you save someone's, what is it worth to you - and if you seek a reward, how do you get it, whatever it may be? Is that life, perhaps, the only valuable thing there is, that has value only to the person who wins twice - getting their life back, and not having to give a reward? The characters in The Beach seek answers to this question - what is a life? what worth does it have? - travelling through many remote places and civilisations. Memoirs, Memorials examines a devious spy - a spy on the secrets of life. If saving lives accumulates confusions, a heap of partial, disparate conclusions - what is a life of duplicity, fiddling, false witness and falsity in general, worth? It seems a fiction, in which someone writes all the parts and is the hero/heroine. Is it meaningless, to be condemned, or is it victimless, as victimless as ordinary, straightforward relationships and personalities - with their bad marriages, bad bargains failures, catching infections from partners who should know better?

Two new tales from John Fraser. The Test - life as a test - and The Scarf - what does casual sex imply?

The death of the Queen was only the beginning for the men and women behind the Crown.On September 8, 2022, an announcement was posted on the gates of Balmoral Castle in Scotland and Buckingham Palace in London that Queen Elizabeth II, the longest serving monarch in British history, had died. That set in motion a remarkable ten days of official mourning and ceremony unlike anything seen in any nation for decades.Members of the royal family gathered—the new King Charles III and his Queen Consort Camilla; the newly-minted Prince of Wales, William and his princess, Kate; Harry the Bolter and his celebrity wife Meghan; and even the bad boy himself, "Prince" Andrew—along with hundreds of royals and heads of states from around the world.Hordes of people, many from overseas, spent long hours lining up in the rain to pay tribute to the beloved monarch, a presence in their lives for seventy years. On the scene for these events, renowned journalist John Fraser takes the reader from inside St. James Palace where the new King was proclaimed to Queen Elizabeth's final resting place at St. George's Chapel in Windsor Castle, from deeply moving scenes to the occasional hilarious screw-up, capturing the magic of the occasion with trenchant observations and witty commentary informed by a lifetime’s experience and curiosity about all things monarchical and his own encounters with the royals.

Two novellas with the common theme of complicity. The Way Back explores the experience of war, flight and rejection. In Elementary Exercises, protagonists engage with authoritarian regimes to escape difficult situations.