THE SCARLET FIG

The Scarlet Fig is the third volume of Avram Davidson's magnum opus, the Vergil Magus trilogy.
Contact therosepress@hotmail.co.uk to order The Scarlet Fig.
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The Scarlet Fig: or, Slowly through a Land of Stone, edited by Grania Davis and Henry Wessells, and published by Rose Press in 2005, is the third and final novel of the Vergil Magus sequence by Avram Davidson. Following The Phoenix and the Mirror (1969) and Vergil in Averno (1987), The Scarlet Fig follows Vergil's adventures in an alternate ancient Mediterranean world where harpies, basilisks, and satyrs co-exist with Rome, Carthage, and the Punic Wars.
- Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Fig 
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"Some books have significance and value beyond their pure value as novels. Certainly The Scarlet Fig is one such - the long awaited third Vergil novel from the late Avram Davidson. Its value as fiction is high enough, mind you. It's very characteristic of late Davidson, stuffed with evidence of his erudition, the prose complicated, eccentric, enjoyable for those of us who have a taste for Davidson's prose. (That said, often a bit prolix, perhaps a bit too precious.) The story concerns Vergil's travels after he leaves Rome ("Yellow Rome"), fearful of accusations of having tarnished a Vestal Virgin, and also menaced by piratical Carthaginians. He visits many strange shores: Corsica, Tingitayne, the Region called Huldah (and its beautiful eponymous ruler), the island of the Lotophageans, where he drinks of the Scarlet Fig, and finally the Land of Stone in North Africa. All along we witness much magic and many wonders - all reflecting the altered Rome of Davidson's Vergil Magus, a Rome reflecting the legends that accumulated in the Middle Ages: so, gloriously grotesque satyrs, victims of the cockatrix, the dogs of the Guaramanty, etc. I enjoyed it greatly, particularly the character of Vergil and the mix of darkness and strangeness throughout. It is also beautifully presented: a large handsome hardcover, with beautiful illustrations, and much excellent additional material to the novel: afterwords by both Davis and Wessells, and several appendices including a few "deleted scenes" and reproductions of some notecards from Davidson's collection ("Encyclopedia") of Vergilian research."
- Richard Horton
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Scarlet-Fig-Slowly-Through/dp/0954827716

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"The Scarlet Fig by Avram Davidson is the third and last Vergil Magus novel. It seems to be unfinished in a sense, in that Davidson probably wanted to revise and polish it further before publication; but he finished the first draft in 1989, four years before his death, and did rewrite at least some parts of it. Three excerpts have been previously published as short stories. This Rose Press edition is edited by Grania Davis and Henry Wessells, and includes essays by each of them (and the publisher, Philip Rose) and excerpts from Avram's other unfinished Vergil writings and his notebooks and index cards on the Vergil story cycle. The main part of the story seems to be set awhile after Vergil in Averno (1987) and long before The Phoenix and the Mirror (1969), though some flashback scenes of Vergil's childhood are earlier.
In the first chapter (published separately as "Yellow Rome, or Vergil and the Vestal Virgin", in Weird Tales and reprinted in The Avram Davidson Treasury), Vergil is present when a mule-cart carrying one of the six Vestal Virgins passes by and is upset when the pavement gives way beneath it; several passersby help steady the cart and prevent its overturning, and Vergil touches the Virgin's arm in helping her not be thrown to the ground. Subsequent events lead him to fear that certain parties regard this touch as a crime deserving death, and he leaves Rome quickly, first going home to Naples, then, when that seems equally unsafe, goes on a long trip into remote parts of the Empire and beyond it.
The long sea voyage — indeed, the novel as a whole — is episodic and less densely plotted than the earlier Vergil novels, though stylistically this novel is, at least in parts, just as dense as Vergil in Averno. (Some sections, whose relation to the rest of the novel was unclear, or which Davidson seems to have cut during the revisions in the last four years of his life, are printed by the editors as appendices.) Avram may have been suggesting that some episodes this sea voyage formed, along with the obvious sources in the Odyssey, the inspiration for Aeneas's sea voyage in the Aeneid; for instance, there's a character who in her relation with Vergil might be an analogue to Calypso/Dido in relation to Odysseus/Aeneas.
The ending is cryptic, and perhaps somewhat unsatisfying; it doesn't conclude the dangling plot threads or set up for the chronologically later The Phoenix and the Mirror in any obvious way, though Henry Wessells offers an interpretation in his "Note on the Text" as to how the cryptic final chapter may imply a tragic ending for some of the character Vergil met earlier. Still, when all is said and done, one doesn't read Davidson primarily for the plot (though some of his best works do have intricate and satisfying plots as well as great style, characterization and worldbuilding). This novel is as good as one can hope for a posthumously published, not quite finished novel by a great author — better than Titus Alone, for instance, the final volume of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy, and more nearly complete than Stevenson's St. Ives or Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
- Jim Henry
http://jimhenry.conlang.org/review/log-0510.htm

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"The third Vergil Magus novel is now available for a wider audience
than the four or five readers it had in manuscript and photocopy circulation.
All the references your editor has made over the years to the joys and sorrows of
the tale are now open to scrutiny and discourse. The book's complexity and the
interplay of image and idea continue to cause marvel and wonder."
- Henry Wessells
http://avramdavidson.org/nutmeg38.htm#Fig

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