NIGHTJAR PRESS 2022 (my previous reviews of this publisher HERE)
“…he never managed to swim right across the lake. He always had to turn back, even before he was anywhere near half-way.”
A sense of the half measures in Zeno’s Paradox coupled with the different paradox inherent in the anonymous mythology of a woman being able to be seen in conjunction with a swan but not with a man. But I wonder whether that was intended by this haunting and limpidly expressed story of a boy-to-man as a rite of passage, gaining childhood confidence by visiting the countryside’s lonely lake and thus defying his parents. But also unease at the mysterious depth it hid, that made him stop halfway. Till he grows older, and he has this story’s core lasting vision, and, even later, he sees that the awesome lake has begun to be contaminated by modern ‘progress’.
Who was Zeus in this hovering fable, I ask? The protagonist himself, unseen even by the omniscience of the words, thus left unexpressed by his threnody of thoughts about the past vision he’d seen and the more minor mistake he had made in its connection, or was it the man, a different man, with whom she had borne children into this world? A sad question. Whatever the case, for me, the result led a similar path, i.e. to our own global version or vision of the Trojan War with its once hidden forces soon even to breach halfway, toward the already baleful end.
My previous review of John Foxx: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/09/best-british-short-stories-2021/#comment-23446
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