THIRD INSTAR
by David Gullen.
Pages 1 – 31
“…the slow slide from seeker to drifter – whatever he had become.”
“The whole world moved at three-quarter speed.”
I’m entranced so far by the world of the Edge, Mazehew the protagonist seeker or drifter, meeting beautiful, Frayel, as frail or not as the sturdy, artfully and characterfully designed carrier-kites or the stone gods or the cauldron, the cosmopolitan area of storytellers, guardians, smoke dancers et al, and whither or whence the escape from his being pickpocket or conman or simply a genuine hero, do we trust him to be who we think he is, do we trust him as much as Frayel does or doesn’t — as they plan, or at least she does, a leap of faith… hardness and softness in a bottomless well of rigidities or shadows, I infer. And much more in these pages. And more yet to read and be entranced by, no doubt.
“There had been no music, yet he had its memory.”
To be continued below…
“When he fell, his body felt boneless, the floor of the iron cauldron soft.”
I wonder if Gullen has created here his own version of Gulliver, as a paradoxical Swift fall from the edge in Lafferty-like slow time, riding within the cauldron with a stowed-away of the city’s fruit-for-sale, along a trend downwards or even back upwards, past water cascades that is in mutual synergy with the city, and slowly past a tantalising opening to a cavern? It felt — with the sense of pulley chains as well as free fall — akin to my personal vision of ‘hawling’ at last. Returned to another version of Edge the city, where Frayel fails to recognise him. Or does she recognise him, after all? But Mazehew even fails to recognise himself or, at least we fail to do so, by his later being referred to in the narration as Alain! I am somehow glad, against all the odds, that I was left without hope of clinching the escapability of this book beyond its covers, as if I am destined to return to it again and again. Glad, if with the mixed feelings of the ‘glide-wing riders’ that somehow continue to reside hereabouts. Give or take the odd fruitseller.
POSSIBLE SPOILERAn instar is a developmental stage of arthropods, such as insects, between each moult, until sexual maturity is reached. Arthropods must shed the exoskeleton in order to grow or assume a new form.
There are three numbered parts to this Gullen work.