It's framed as the work of the eponymous Master, and is the story of one Pontius Pilate. The rather nifty central conceit is that in addition to the devil-comes-to-town story, there's a second narrative strand running through the novel. It's a complex sprawl of a novel, certainly, and a structuralist's dream. Bulgakov, according to Mike's argument, was writing to an agenda, and happened to write a fantasy. It didn't see print until the late sixties. Even though a fantasy, when it was written the novel was unpublishable. The Master and Margarita is a satire, amongst other things a reaction to the anti-religious government agenda of the time. In short, it is unambiguously a fantasy novel.īut: Bulgakov wrote the novel between 19, and he was writing in Soviet Russia. There's magic both intimate and extravagant, witches and demons and talking cats, decapitation and re-capitation and a really quite confused populace. The relevance of this is that I've just finished reading Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita ( full text| annotations| film adaptation not to star Mr Depp after all), in which the devil and his merry band descend on Moscow, wreaking.well, about as much havoc as you'd expect, really. Thus, goes the argument, there's no point analysing it from that perspective. Alasdair Gray did not set out to write a novel of speculative fiction he did not write from a position within the SF tradition, nor did he write in dialogue with that tradition. I'm sure there's nothing you'd all like more than for me to relate this story, so his objection went something like this: Whilst it's true that (and I think this actually was one of his examples) Lanark is clearly SF, to consider it as 'an SF novel' is counterproductive, because the fact that it is SF is not the most important thing about it. Review: The Master And Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakovīack at my flatwarming, Mike explained why he objected to 'literary works' being claimed as SF.
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