physical book review: 'Always the Horizon' by Murdoch Murdoch

Our favourite anime trio have finally broken out of the cartoon, not merely into text but into physicality - behold, Always the Horizon!

It’s a pleasing little volume of 113 pages, with lovely colour illustrations.

The content, as I indicated in my earlier review of the ebook, is very Nietzschean in style, but also a creature of 4chan, specifically /pol in all its chaos, crudity, vigour, erudition, violence, nuance. A random sample:

Where there was Achilles or Christ, now there lies a tenebrous void. As a result of the loss of objective meaning, we began to sink into the Swamps of Sadness by our own volition. A quarter of our kind have become hedonists and another quarter have become ascetic. Half of them run on mere Darwinian survival impulses with no glimpse into the here and now, with no humanity. But you must love them all the same, rider. For our task is to rescue from peril the European continuum. Look around you; these graves mark the history of this all-too-impressive animal in all its variance. This hallowed ground covered in Celtic chain mail, Scythian arrowheads, Roman legionaries’ scutums, and German battle axes all serve to remind us of our propensity for violence.

It cannot, alas, capture the humour of the cartoons; in this it is closest to their last, serious, episode: Guardian of the Rune. While reading, I thought, How monumental an atrocity, to murder Europe. Sure, countries have been conquered, cities razed, but to kill Europe itself - that is a crime so black, so enormous, that it must surely awake deep reserves of spirit and resolve in what is left of the European peoples. Americans though they are, Murdoch Murdoch’s particular blend of insane comedy and battle philosophy is part of this awakening, this reaching-out to a new meaning for the European spirit.