FROM THE CHRONICLES OF THE SUN (2023)
CONTINUED FROM PART ONE HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/02/solage-nimbus-ashley/
My continued review will appear in the comment stream below, as and when I read this book…
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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
“…to own as many names as he could count from the digits emanating from his stretching wrist,…”
We learn more about Alani’s potential or actual estrangement from Olympia amid his universe of dividing, Kafkaesque-controlled destinies amid the plot of war and Solage base, his more than just a mishap with the train and what mass-lethal thing he carried in his bag as described by a sentence that certainly has a fairy bit of that sentence haunting the rest of the very same sentence, and of a competing ‘computer’, Cob-Irena against Socrat-V7?
“…as the world in balance.”
“People seldom ventured beyond the glass gates which marked the boundaries between inside and outside, otherwise they readily sought the wastelands publicly known as nature’s realm, such as it was after climate change brought on by the careless people who had forgotten about what they were doing, along with the other environmental adjustments the mechanised fortress known as Cob-Irena felt prudent to undertake.”
….“inside and outside”, it says. There’s often so much inwardly self-haunted as well as outwardly fingerposted by each of some sentences in the book, while in this particular section we also experience a fine comic scene where a lady called Violet — with strange ways in swallowing drink — meets various male suitors.
Read so far up to: “I’m king around here but that’s just the news.”
Cob-Irena has some sort of aerobic beacon? My question, not the book’s.
And is Legolas from Tolkien a relevant reference for me to make?
“The blob was visibly incandescent covered by the overheating turbines kept in sway with each revolution throughout the various transitive states of physicality.”
Each section is teeming with ideas and plot movements-forward and their own later version of ‘bonding-loop’, and character-gathering, each section with its own ‘nexus’, and here it is Michalis relating to earlier plotting points regarding Alani and his mass-lethal device, and here also the nature of Cob-Irena, just two ingredients of which being stone fortress and weather station. Plus ‘surround sound telepathy’, gender dating with the conceits ‘dream man’ and the aforementioned ‘bonding-loop’, together with yesterday’s ‘shape-shifting’, today’s ‘pocket cosmos’ and much else.
“Violet found his remark gauche in the extreme and beneath contempt. As promising fodder fit for the Socrat-V7 unit, Petrioc had negligently shaped an entirely redundant motif of love.”
Two sections read, today. Further dating- or mating-dances or suitor-suiting, I infer, in interface both with Socrat-V7 and the imputed (control) weather-station Cob-Irena. In this context, the concept of ‘bonding-loops’ and, now, “cadence” can also be seen in interface with the book’s own given-as-read non-linearity of narrative.
The use of phrases in italics (erstwhile leitmotifs) are, I find, becoming constructive vanishing- or beaming-points for the reader into new unknown realms rather than mere fingerposts pointing towards them?
“; pick less of the sort that disappear and reappear if you please. That way you can plot their position even more precisely than hitherto.”
Cross-referenced later here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/14/david-bowie-enid-blyton-and-the-sun-macine-nicholas-royle-2/#comment-27897
“The guardians never tried to sort out if the light was shared by others standing on globes equally spinning around a star, and so the rumination led to a conundrum to be reviewed within each person’s conscience.”
From the ‘Trouser Race’ mentioned earlier, to a highly numinous, ruminatory section headed DRONES (half read so far) with ‘moths’ and ‘humanoids’ and ‘mosquito bugs’ and an indefinite ‘moon’ as well as the inferred sun or star in its old age as solage, I guess, and a camp if not a blast of hunters, a stoical work ethos, history of a shaggy beast, a shooting match, stone missiles, plus communal music and a pandemonium and we also learn Olympia has another name and a plexiglass mirror.
I will not be saying so much about the details or quoting so much from this book the deeper that I delve into it, but I shall continue do so, while still finding my feet, if not my elbows, while reading it in its early stages of evolution. (See the Prelude in ‘Nemonymous Night’ as tentative comparison, but I am only one reader of this book, and other readers will no doubt have their own bespoke views.)
“Trouser People were well named as their feet were earth bound and without wings, they were clearly jealous of the various organisms that did own the side swiping gadgets required for air flight and out of jealousy, they robbed the flying creatures of their freedom to roam the skies.”
I have now read all sections before the one headed COB-IRENA, keeping my powder dry as I am unsure about what I see as Olympia’s wrestling with her own ‘self’ — in a mating-dance with an unknown man (in the moon?) at the ‘moon ball’ — this being as ungraspable as the nature of what are now called ‘Trouser Folk’, her semaphore, too, and the emotions that can only be thus expressed in the reader’s increasingly growing-into the seemingly unique ‘Solage’ style, alongside what is here called a ‘homing beacon’, making me feel at least gratified that ‘beacon’ is a word I somehow near-anagrammatically predicted above in one of my asides. Onward with reading more about ‘Cob-Irena’ next time…
‘… this book’s foregoing and ever-strengthening osmosis and ratiocination as a dual synergy. And there is beginning to emerge a uniquely adept use of italics that so far inexplicably works towards such a synergy, reflecting many themes in our own times today that are happening outside of this book but increasingly being implicated or shape-shifted by the book from inside itself.’ — and my review is now haunting itself just as this book as a whole haunts itself as well as its actual sentences internally haunting themselves one by one?
COB-IRENA
“…meant to be an automated weather meddler struggling to bring the climate under control and as the radiation levels were higher than usual, the rays of Sol were ever more disrupted.”
A literarily and meticulously adept portrait of a previously ‘encaged’ machine called Cob-Irena. Much of this book, I am told, was written from 2011 onwards, before AIs became commonly touchable in recent times. C-I: a coded weather station that could destroy us all. Its chief steward is called Petrioc and as a machine it seems to have ‘suitors’ like Violet does! Petrioc a ‘dish of a man’ near an oval glass clock face.
I have now read up to:
“Nothing was more attractive to the humans as the desire to control ‘their’ destiny. However, humankind was not keen on working for the requisite long hours to make things happen in their interest — in that case, Cob-Irena was relied upon to prepare a quick fix.”
I am now fast coming to the conclusion that this is a unique book dealing with — even, from back when, prophesying — our times by a strange but adept use of language and thought: italic portals, self-haunting and elegant gaucheness. Here, as we delve deeper into the nature of Cob-Irena as a beacon from the more hands-on mainframe past to the numinous AI future and then back to the present in which you are reading this book! A cage of potential rage, with stewards like Petrioc, war as an infectious illness, ‘virtual sunsets’, ‘courtly love’, the ‘lie of the land’ itself as part of some sun-astrological power called Solage? And what of the owl? So much else to mention and to quote in this section of three or four pages, I am spoilt for choice, so I will leave it there till next time.
“…Cob-Irena’s turbines ran on full pelt while the wobbling throng outside…”
Climate storms, man’s marauding, Sol vapours et al.
Trouser people and C-I’s tyranny and much else.
I ineluctably learn more and more about this book each day, consciously and, I sense, osmotically.
CAVEAT: I think all such ongoing episodic thoughts about this book genuinely, while, in real life, I know its author well. A book that started being written by this author in 2011, now completely written.
Pingback: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/22/for-all-solagists
“She spoke much like dreaming under clouds.”
Nimbus clouds over shifting sands with a Socratic-V7 Latin passage to re-boot? Yet, this section today is a vastly dual colour-coded button-pushing and invigoratingly ventriloquistic section just read (ventriloquism: another form of self-haunting and personal portals and ‘Educating Archie’ colloquialisms?) whereby Olympia and reel-to-reels interact after her persistent loss of Alani, her two sons now grown up, all this being, I sense, a tactile Bakelite experience of such processes in interface with Socrat-V7 and later to be broadcast from a ‘vessel settled out to sea beyond Jaye.’
Much here, too, about ‘fairy tale’ to match my reading yesterday in the ‘Fairy’ section of the Royle – Bowie book, my review being linked earlier above.
Now read up to: “…subjected to Socrates.”
Öppenhoff, Piquadador and Constanza
More italic portals in this section. Indeed, this is another section that sort of takes the reader’s breath away. The prior reference around Olympia and ventriloquism resonates with Öppenhoff’s voice being wormholed rather than portalled by Piquadador (the Voice Snatcher?) and the actual name Ōppennhoff is pronounced, I’m told, like the sound of someone being sick! From Larch Court to the ‘water carriers’ when added to the ambiance of Jaye on Sea, this whole section made me think it should be released as a pre-taster for this book, although I have only read the book so far up to page 116 out of 713!
“…there were no wasted ligaments or muscles derived from his methodology, just a frame portal running on battery power allowing another distinct plane of representation to dwell neatly within its perimeter.”
The neophyte Solagist reader should, I sense, pay very special heed to this section that I read today, on Christmas Day, about a baby in a cradle lost in the ice and barleycorn. A crucial chapter making the book’s non-linear plot move in unexpected but definite directions, about Olympia’s current baby daughter Pollymina, and her two sons. If I told you more, it would spoil it for you.
“— a hullabaloo brow built upon everything paraded through the immense sun like face structure flickering at the avenue of men sat on their stools before her.”
This longest section so far (?) presents, for me, an apotheosis of the seemingly unique, elegantly gauche style of the narration with its beaming-out portals picked out by italics carried inside the self-haunted sentences, deploying more ‘bonding-loops’, ‘tape-loops’ on reel to reel with voice loss coming and going, and a barroom with ‘drinking-loops’ amid the ironic ‘courtly love’ choreography of three shadowy-thirds as triangle (bordering on salaciousness) — Constanza with her shoulder-line bosom, the veils and piques of Piquadador and the phonetically gipping-named Öppenhoff.
Prose that throws its own voice without the need of a ventriloquist as intermediary.
Jaye cliffs, a lily garden, pre-Raphaelite zeal, Elégiac trade routes, et al. Much else to mention “Down by the angry seashores”, while Constanza — ‘petrified silhouette’, after staring out to sea in the shape, for me, of the French Lieutenant’s Woman — exits from centre stage of our attention and “the subjunctive mind palace consisting of suppositions, maybes and maybe-nots.”
Then, Bartholomew Gollenspiel seems to me to be an elderly Dr. Who with a “plexiglass gadget”, and under “his direct supervision a teenager named Pollymina…” up to which reference I have so far read partly into a second section today. Yes, the same Pollymina, I guess.
Part three of this review continues here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/28/solage-by-n-ashley-3/