Monday, December 04, 2023

SOLAGE by Nimbus Ashley (1)

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4 thoughts on “SOLAGE – Nimbus Ashley”

  1. PRELUDE TO MY READING AND MY THOUGHTS

    ‘From out yon nimbus cloud, the mighty sun

    Sweeps o’er the raptured woods his golden beams,

    And wakens in my soul such dulcet chords

    As harp or breathing organ never swelled.’

    — James Rigg, from Wild Flower Lyrics and Other Poems, 1897

    “…the repetition of the line about the sun machine in the second half of ‘’Memory of a Free Festival’. We might suppose that it’s also a son machine.”
    — Nicholas Royle, from David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the sun machine, 28 November 2023. (My concurrent review of this Royle book started only a few days ago HERE.)

    • Only a few minutes later, I read this typical passage in LIVING (1929) by Henry Green:
      “Water dripped from tap on wall into basin and into water there. Sun. Water drops made rings in clear coloured water. Sun in there shook on the walls and ceiling. As rings went out round trembling over the water shadows of light from sun in these trembled on walls. On the ceiling.”
      (My concurrent review HERE)

  2. SOLAGE

    A remarkable first sentence: “The passage of time can be problematic when it is scarce.” As anyone might say to themselves picking up this book of such challenging size! But I am easily drawn into these first few remarkable pages of elegantly gauche prose between single breaking stars, with steam, a “winter sun”, a station clock where long-term partners often meet for the first time, architecture and thermodynamics, and a tactilely described train journey embarked upon by a couple and their backstory as Olympia and Alani. And a front story of the latter’s accident upon this journey. Meanwhile who is Michalis and what is ‘solage-base’? Much more to descry, as ‘them’s the rules’. So much more that is tantalising to probe, teeming off only three pages!

“He knew what was necessary so there wasn’t any room for doubt: to expose impurities within the message content and manage the talked about theme towards a fixed outcome.”

We hope constructively to feel the same as the words above while we enter the new scenario, a scenario only obviously connected by mention of the place ‘Clamforth’ to the previous scenario — until other connections become clearer later, I sense. An interrogation of prisoners in this glass chamber with one swivel chair, but why just one chair? Name of another place is mentioned, i.e. Jaye, and a futuristic or alternate world computer system, I think, called SOCRAT-V7. And character names such as Andrej, Öppenhoff, Ms μ, Mr φ, and a sheepish prisoner in a blue duffle coat, and we gather some matters by mere implication of Pinteresque dialogue (yum-snacks) as we do in novels by Henry Green or Ivy Compton-Burnett.
I have so far read up to: “Please do spill the beans.” It seems, meanwhile, to echo something about us….

“…truth, like everything else, was rationed out and then dropped altogether into a misleading conglomerate of expletives and threats.”

 nullimmortalis Edit

“…a machine hybrid called Socrat-V7.”
Away from Öppenhoff’s ‘waiting room’, I wonder whether I am already on to something in, so far, relating some of this to David Bowie’s ‘sun machine’, especially in a book like this called SOLAGE. Yet, any solace is so far sparse with memories of the ‘Solage War’ that reminds me of so many of the sadnesses today in our own alternate or time-different world from where you are reading this tome. Meantime, we learn more about the two sons, yes, two sons, of Alani and Olympia, and the sister Pollymina quacking away in her cot, Bluey the cat, and their chum called Petrioc. I cannot hope to itemise all the details in this uniquely rich text, the more fulfilling the more you dwell on it, but I’m still grappling with the concept of a ‘slithery crater’, if I recall the expression correctly!
Read up to: “…the correct price for ripping out one’s throat all in one go.”

nullimmortalis Edit

Read up to: “What else was a caretaker to do while Socrat-V7 manufactured what it thought meant the truth.”

Who’d’ve thought a reel-to-reel would be involved in such processes. A bit like a ZX81? A little section that says much. I am becoming more and more involved myself! It needs to be read as a code as well as up front words such as ‘metal teeth’.. More about Ms μ, Mr φ. (Not noticed before that ‘metal’ has ‘meta’ embedded.)
Clamforth mentioned again.

“He watched the sun lurch over the horizon for one more time, together with as many of the half-forgotten truths from his past mounting up in his dreams, […] ‘You’ll find naught but machines and trouble out here boys —‘“

I genuinely look forward to my hopefully regular doses of SOLAGE, and am increasingly haunted by it. Here, arguably, a Clamforth council wasteground, amidst an undermind of war and tribulation, and the merging between man and metal (here Bartholomew in a duffle coat with a blue robe beneath it) — as watched by Olympia’s two boys, Steb and Progrin, and their thoughts of scrounging and survival. The prose style maintains its signature elegant gaucheness that charms rather than frustrates, regardless of any caveats to this review that will be left hanging in the air until I reach the review’s time-distant end, because a slow, yet unpainstaking, reading of this major tome is advisable, as far as I can see, before reaching any considered evaluation following my ongoing description and tentative interpretation.

“’May the warmth of the sun glow on you forever,’ he said. It was effortless to mock Mr φ who was taking down Öppenhoff’s particulars for the stenographic version.”

This is quite tantalising stuff: Ö with his ‘music hall lyrics’ or gimmicks, as we gather more of what is happening, the Solage War, Jaye and the wasteland, the nature of Socrat-V7, and how all this relates to our own truth as telling lies as well as the evolving machinery today, and this section seems to be a significant prophecy of that Co-Vivid Enquiry session yesterday in our own real-time where ‘my lady’ writes with “an old-fashioned nib pen as an alternative to the big magnet poised to chew up the ribbon pinched between a set of two revolving metal wheels carrying words and pictures either side of it.” She records, in this way, what’s going on while the liar lied into a stenographer’s hands as well as streamed into our own AI’s cyberspace, I guess. The nature of Socrat-V7 in this light, and its accoutrements and its attendants, one thinks one is beginning really to understand. This whole Solage world, too. Just beginning!

  1. My second section of this book read today, although I expect in future to read only one section per day (personal circumstances permitting) to do full justice as far as possible to it — and this next substantive section reaches, I feel, the apotheosis, so far, of this book’s charmingly insinuating style, but more than that, its unparalleled disarming qualities, deadpan at its own sense of self-beguiling. This scene of Olympia at a disco or rave in a sort of ballroom cannot be done justice to in this review. And her thoughts as she becomes entangled with a male dancer are like chasing round inside a snow globe of imagination. Astonishingly, as an aside, I have so far read up to “…within the bounds of the Cane Asylum.” and in the other ‘David Bowie Sun Machine’ book I am concurrently reading and have already linked to above, I had recent cause to mention the Cane Hill asylum of yore!

  2. “…he agreed with μ that to reveal one’s gender via a name giving ceremony was unhelpful.”

    I am fast learning that the meaning of this book is channelled both by the reader’s submission to a pervasive osmosis as well as to ratiocination, and here the former comes into even stronger play as we absorb the processing of ordinary folk like us by such a giant computer-mechanical as a word-semantical book — a container plant or laboratory that sets against each other pen-nib versus analog versus digital versus something far more rarefied than even cybersoace, all amidst wartime and concepts like Solage and placenames like Jaye-on-Sea. And character names or Mr/Mrs designations that often do, after all, purport to reveal gender, but not necessarily humanity (like μ).
    I am still only scratching surfaces within this sandbox of a book. Yet to get a full handle as illustrated by its front cover.

    1. “Mister employer was more graceful than the incredible way flesh and blood were content to block out the sun posing with full biomass in between the earth and the sky. Implausible as it may sound, this man had streamlined himself through the arts of bodily contortion matched against his full machismo.”

      We follow the later life of Progrin, the son of Olympia and Alani, among many comings and goings, like the sun itself, in fact recurrent perhaps strobing vanishments, whereby he worked in his workplace amid the rumours and conspiracies, and the old man – was this his employer? – with a pen nib, and much else that resonates with 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.

    2. FROM “the owl wearing a fur coat” and a “blithering bounder” unmentioned by me above as two of many potential leitmotifs in this book TO the next section that disperses any doubt as to the passions of each reading moment. Today’s moment, though, is even more real and heartfelt and believable, a classic section that needs savouring again and again, whatever other connections I may have with the author…

      ***

      “At the bottom of my garden and beyond the hedge, down to the woods at the back and beyond where the eye cannot see, where the wild honeysuckle and foxgloves grow, there is a family of fairies. I have seen them. At night, when they think it is safe and all the ‘Trouser People’ have gone to bed, they come out and do their work with little glowing lights around them.”

      A section about Olympia’s lullabies and storytelling to baby Pollymina, crammed with many other images that are visionary and memorable with wordplay, too many moments to itemise here, alongside the background of war, while she competes with herself vis à vis someone other than Alani her husband, “with an unfortunate infringement such as an affair with a man subtracted from his name.”

    3. A section regarding the processing of memes and mnemonics in the all-consuming, all-tantalising context of this book’s own evolving ‘reality’ of hard-bitten war and cyberspace politics, making me think it is incredible that I have only reached so far page 54 out of 713!
      And that there may be very little solace in silage…

      “…registering on carbon paper kept for back-up ease in case Socrat-V7 failed the duty run — […] …freeloading its excrement…[…] …leaving a mulch of refined soundbites and chatter…” 

      “Admittedly, many of the sea folk shared a poor diet derived from the fried scranthey ate by tradition from a tubby pudding basin.”

      The mulch of Solage, to this significant pen-picture of Jaye-On-Sea, a small coastal town just south of Clamforth, more striking than any place’s succinct pen-picture I can recall from any SF that I have ever read, a genius-loci with a pirate radio ship’s tall mast, and radio matters such as short wave and medium, much else including Piquadador (new tyrant) on the Rose Fulcrum boat DJing, and implications for the swelling-morsels of plot. Incredibly, the pen-picture reminded me obliquely and inadvertently of many aspects of my novella ‘The Apocryphan’ (recently re-published) but I know for a definite fact this author has not yet read it! The literary gestalt is some sort of god I guess.


      nullimmortalis Edit

      “The voice buried in the turf found solace with the clouds —“

      The next section is certainly a most haunting of indeterminate ghost stories featuring Olympia and a woman called Constanza and a sailor buried in ground near an altar-house, where a sentence can haunt itself and the ‘italic’ phrases are not Wagnerian leitmotifs as I originally thought but perhaps fingerposts to an alternate world or several different alternate worlds, or all of these things! With an echo of a reference to Alani’s earlier mishap with a train. Every section of this book needs careful placement within the evolution of its narrative osmosis-bank, while enjoying reading each one as a distinct mood for the day.

      This review will continue here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/14/solage-by-nimbus-ashley-2/


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