This is really a disappointment, but can't be a 2-star book because both the quality of prose and my expectations were so high. I'd been convinced this might just turn out to be one of my favourites (love the title and premise), but such a let down. I suppose I wanted more plot--how to protect the Collection, why did this happen, etc., and instead most of the plot was about some dreary non-girlfriend with all the effervescent personality of a dishcloth, and the highest stakes were about whether to go dancing or dreaming instead.

I'd love someone to take the premise and really run with it, the way that Buffy the Vampire Slayer the TV show ended up 1,000 times better than Buffy the movie.

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). ( )

I've read a certain amount of Science Fiction, and Fantasy so this book as a work of creation, doesn't strike me as surrealistic, or strange. But it does deal with the basic relation between the writer and his creation. Once you've written a piece, it has a life of its own, and you may be very surprized abut what the rest of the world things you've written. The suspicion that the rest of the world is more perceptive can be crushing.
A man sees a phenomenon, a great collection of Victoriana, some other people can see it, most can't understand how it appeared. The Collection survives but it is changed by contact with sensible people. It is, it seems, more than its parts and more than one thing. Moore leaves us with a counsel of well, "Let's get on with whatever life serves up...it's what's for dinner. Wanna starve? That's the other option. ( )

Quite often we shy away from books that are about inanimate objects and not about people. Books that are about objects usually anthropomorphize the objects so that we can relate to them. Few writers manage to tackle this subject and excel at it. Perhaps the best work ever is A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, which is a treatise on a single individual's obsession with his collection of antiques, relics, books, paintings and other curiosa. Brian Moore in The Great Victorian Collection may have found yet another wonderful way of making it appear that a large collection of objects is the theme of the novel while instead, the focus is in fact the people in the story. More astonishingly is the start of the book in which the writer uses the literary taboo theme of: "When I woke up this morning ...".

A professor from Canada is staying overnight in a motel in Carmel, California. His specialty is Victoriana and one evening he dreams that a large collection of 19th century museum pieces materialized in the vacant parking lot behind the motel. To his astonishment, when he wakes up the next morning, his dream has come true and he finds a large collection of old valuable objects neatly packed into the parking lot as if ready for an exhibition.

Throughout the rest of the novel we learn about the interaction between the protagonist and the collection. He can not be too far away from it or the objects fade and deteriorate. He can not remove the objects from the parking lot or they instantly turn into cheap fakes by some magical means. Even though the pivotal point of the story is the large amount of inanimate objects in the collection, the real subject is the relationship we have with our physical brittle world around us and how much we incorporate the perceived value of the things we collect. In some sense it is a reply or an answer to A Rebours or maybe it is a further examination of the theme in Oscar Wilde's Dorian Grey. In Dorian Grey the model for a painting transfers his morals, ailments and other undesirable human traits into the painting on the canvas while he himself thrives and doesn't age. In contrast, in The Great Victorian Collection objects and art works take hold of a person and can only exist when he exists.

When reading a novel about treasure, no matter how well described, no matter how grand or important the objects are, we fail to obtain sustenance from them. The literary endeavor is ultimately about people and no matter much of a hermit we might be, or how great our gathering of important objects, we can not live without being surrounded by other people. This novel here, The Great Victorian Collection, directly confronts us with our humanity by allowing us to experience through the writing what we would end up with if we only relied on objects for our survival. ( )

Brian Moore's novel The Great Victorian Collection tells the wonderfully bizarre story of Anthony Maloney, a 29-year-old assistant professor of history at Canada's McGill University in Montreal, and an expert in Victoriana. One morning, while on a trip to San Francisco to attend a seminar at Berkeley, Maloney wakes up to find that a dream he's had has come true: Outside his hotel window a vast, magnificent collection of exquisite and rare Victorian objects has magically appeared in the hotel parking lot.

From that moment, Maloney's life is completely taken over by the care and maintenance of the collection. The mass of objects is so large it can't be moved, so the hotel management has to be placated. Security has to be seen to. The press and TV journalists are soon clamoring for interviews. Maloney acquires an agent and an assistant (and promptly falls in love with his assistant's young girl friend). Debates develop between rival academic camps – some claim the collection is the real thing, others believe the objects to be very skillful fakes; although no one seems able to explain how Maloney might have pulled off such a "hoax." And Maloney finds, somewhat to his dismay, that when he goes to sleep at night, he can only dream about the collection – he conjured it up, and he's destined to guard it – even in his dreams.

Throughout the book, Maloney himself struggles with the problem of just how real or unreal the collection might be. Was it actually created by his dream? Or is there some other mystery involved? And if it is just a manifestation of his imaginings, what exactly is allowing it to exist in the real world? Is it here to stay, or likely to disappear just as suddenly as it came into being? At one point, Maloney experiments with trying to remove an object – an antique toy train engine – from the collection only to find the engine seriously altered when he inspects it afterward.

In the end, the collection causes Maloney nothing but grief, and his attempts to maintain it in its pristine condition fail miserably. But that's all I'll say about the ending because there are twists and surprises I don't really want to reveal (including a strange subplot involving Mary Ann, the young companion of Maloney's assistant, and a road trip to Los Angeles).

This stunningly inventive, and deliciously weird novel won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Canadian Governor General's Award for Fiction in 1975, but seems to be out of print now. And that's too bad. It really deserves to be rediscovered. ( )

http://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/2008/04/10/the-great-victorian-collection-brian... ( )