2 thoughts on “The Numbers – Jackdaws”

  1. THE NUMBERS by Christopher Burns
    Numbered 23 of 200, and signed.
    “…but the mist is clearing and the rising sun is the colour of a communion wafer.”
    Please note the date of this real-time review, this dreamcatcher of fiction, as if it has itself dreamcaught the spirit of this short cathartic or angry period in British political history. As if it is a sudden storm out of nothing, having begun like an episode of The Archers, with motivations as nonchalant nuances, the nagging weight of past misuderstandings or mistakes as two brothers meet unexpectedly at the whim of one of them, alongside the catalyst of the other one’s wife. Self-pity of the whimsical brother…
    And if I tell you any more, it will spoil this effectively described story of unscryable intention and poetic phrase – and spoil any shock it might or might not hold for you especially after what recently happened on the streets of Britain in recent days and whether the brother’s tontine prize is to remain or leave…
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  2. JACKDAWS by Neil Campbell
    Copy 29 of 200, signed with understandably disguised squiggle.
    “Above all stood the bulk of Castle Naze, and the long ridge line of Coombs Edge with the cotton grass still blowing.”
    I was intrigued by the word ‘Naze’ as I had seen it previously used but only as part of the name of my birthplace 68 years ago, Walton-on-the-Naze…
    Beside the point …but the main, imputably shocking, point — of this obsessive, almost incantatory, almost anti-novelistic, detail-poeticised, recurrently seasonal walking through the narrator’s rural locale in Derbyshire — is also half beside the point, even if it is disguised like the beautiful pamphlet’s signature. It’s the other half of the point that counts, with the motivational nuances of the Jackdaws’ scryable patterns as well as of the tontine’s numbers in Numbers. We draw our own conclusions.
    I was also impressed with the detailed refrains of the locale’s places in the narrator’s
    art of walking around and around, not around an ‘elephant in the room’, but around, say, the evidence in the household rubbish dump. An art of walking like that of Richard Long.
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