Three Beauties de John Fraser

Three Beauties

John Fraser

Three Beauties is John Fraser's latest tour de force in speculative fiction. Beauty is an idea of perfection, moral, physical, social, political - and these three tales, with their beautiful questing characters, exemplify the search for the best there is. In the first tale, the heroine aspires to perfection in sex, sport and literature. Genetic improvement too is tried - but in the end she runs foul of the classical link between beauty, judgement and the struggle to be top. Afrodite, the acme of beauty, notoriously had her champions, and intervened - unfairly - to have them score in battle. In the second tale, Afrodite is absent or indifferent, as the characters tangle with high politics, and seek in vain a measure of social improvement. The final tale has the beauty, the heroine, in a mechanical role, to oil the plot. The moral is that perfection lies beyond the world, up in the sky.

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John Fraser lives near Rome. Previously, he worked in England and Canada. Of Fraser's fiction the Whitbread Award winning poet John Fuller has written: 'One of the most extraordinary publishing events of the past few years has been the rapid, indeed insistent, appearance of the novels of John Fraser. There are few parallels in literary history to this almost simultaneous and largely belated appearance of a mature ¿uvre, sprung like Athena from Zeus's forehead; and the novels in themselves are extraordinary. I can think of nothing much like them in fiction. Fraser maintains a masterfully ironic distance from the extreme conditions in which his characters find themselves. There are strikingly beautiful descriptions, veiled allusions to rooted traditions, unlikely events half-glimpsed, abrupted narratives, surreal but somehow apposite social customs.'