“Improvisation, avoidance of any beaten track,…”
Another Cicerones journey or a new Pilgrim’s Progress, a noisy cascade of Aickmanly self-indulgence, depicting a young man with a double barrelled name who leaves his Tent to travel his future life, a series of encounters with his future self or “near-doubles” and characters he seems to know in some previous life and to whom he had done some bad, as well as encountering others while his future sins couched as past ones are divulged to this confessional of pages, as it were, including an appearance by me today in the role of an old ‘intruding duffer’!
The fabulous journey entails the eponymous legendary bower which he, with his Tent, seeks by dint of some ordained crazy improvisation — a bower named after Henry II’s mistress. A bower eventually discovered, and described in a perfectly wonderful Aickmanly manner, at the overlapped Niemandswasser ownership of a no man’s land of fields and meadows. Here the bower is a maze, with no cows mooing from Bashan, and no birds at all except a frightening grey peacock.
One of his encounters is with a young boy-page who turns out to be a girl (cf the Cicerones) whom the narrator scandalously wishes to “gather up” and to “defeather” her cap while she “posed with legs far apart”, as well as later encountering a beautiful woman, Rosamund as a Virgin Mother figure, who, I infer, transcends his earlier dubious desires or she is perhaps another version of himself without the so-called poison of masculinity, judging by some of Aickman’s other works.
An Abbess, a Seneschal, some doggy pugs, a stone kiosk or shrine and much else, heraldic or otherwise. Some quotes below that should be remembered so as to encapsulate a gestalt of whoever dreamt all this up, and whoever it was escaping at the end into what he hoped is a different future! One where the feathered birds had all already by now returned…
“The words ‘a big woman’ are frightening in themselves.”
“The peacock had been assuredly male, but the Abbess had the same eye as the peacock and a similarly shrivelled and pointed face,…”
“…he would not have been the man he was, part poet, part dreamer, part babe, had it been otherwise.”
“He suspected, indeed he knew, that it had happened, or would happen, again and again.” Again and again like Zeno’s Paradox.
“…the Father of Lies”, who has now returned again.
“…lovers caressing, and saints suffering; or possibly the reverse.”
That ‘wisp of demons’ in yesterday’s Insufficient Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything: “It had ears with points; a wispy, tufted tail…”
“A perfectly bloody tangle. Nothing definite anywhere.”
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All my reviews of Aickman: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/
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