(1884-1953) Scottish translator and author, in Argentina from 1931 at the latest, whose World War One novella, The Cross of Carl: An Allegory [for full subtitle see Checklist] (written 1917; 1931), transgresses more than once against generic expectations with a ruthlessness of Equipoise (a term rarely used in this encyclopedia to describe early twentieth-century works) that makes it a central text in the history of Fantastika Between the Wars. The brutally realistic Part One describes a minor skirmish in the war, after which the protagonist, taken for dead, is transported in Part Two – bound immovably into a fasces made up of dead companions – to a factory at the end of a siding where the corpses are due to be rendered into pig slop; the tone of this narrative uncannily prefigures World War Two and some industrial aspects of the Final Solution (> Holocaust Fiction). Escaping from this "Golgotha", the protagonist buries himself in a shallow grave, being aroused by the German Kaiser and an Allied Marshal, who are travelling amiably together. Together they kill the protagonist: which is to say they finish their mutual job of slaughter. Owen's second novel, "More Things in Heaven . . . " (1947) is an extremely complicated occult fantasy involving curses and a secret history of the world. [JC]
Walter Owen
born Glasgow, Scotland: 14 July 1884
died Argentina: 24 September 1953
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