FROM THE CHRONICLES OF THE SUN (2023)
CONTINUED FROM PART FOUR HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/01/06/solage-by-nimbus-a-4o/
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.
Séance
“She wiped her pupils clean as if to cover the significant pools of light emitting from their circumference lest a tentative reading gave cause for her friends to rejoice in her identification as a Trouser Person.”
Take a deep breath before you start this massive section. It takes pluck to read it in one sitting, a deep pleasure, too.
A ‘tentative reading’, yes, but one that needs a reader’s osmosis as well as an UNtentative deliberation and ratiocination. It needs a self-séance as well as a mingling with the characters and their motives, stemming from the book’s previous leitmotifs, portals and wormholes of style and meaning. The plot machinations are complex, Machiavellian, ever-morphing, and I will not be able to itemise in this real-time review what these various characters are manipulating, whether it is to rescue Pollymina from the spider craft’s Socrat-V7, or to optimise the effects of Elégiac, or to prepare humanity for interstellar travel following all that has been going on, and to consider if the internet will outlast humanity, all geared and fine-tuned, inter alia, to the act of interpersonal ‘wooing’ patterns and musical formulations. I give below some more of what this book might call ‘bleeding chunks’ as a tiny few examples out of many, and the particular quote containing mention of Brahms seems to broad-brush the skills the reader actually needs in reading this book at all!
Its ‘hex codes’ and ‘magical runes’, to match Poe’s ‘magic pinions and wizard wheels’ in his ‘The Premature Burial’, to jump-start a moribund existence alongside our ability to absorb some of the many ideas and plot-lines and characters playing out in this book. Analogue and digital and numinous, just three of the other factors holding hands around the planchette. The ‘turbines’ and ‘metal golem’, notwithstanding.
“This was much ado with opening a supply chain to sell old brooms and kitchen utensils. The square shaped shop they now owned contained extra dimensions…”
“Thereafter, Elégiac evoked a speeding world out of its allotted sequence of events — to have one’s cake and eat it all in one chomp.”
“She usually preferred runic script as the most legible for any of her missives sent out to a human crowd, angered by their constant reprimand twittering with sound bites into the delicate microphones as if to threaten her harm. Olympia was trying hard to channel Violet’s strange articulations into symbols by writing just above the ledgers and in plain text. So that Olympia revealed what Violet was truly saying, she operated an age-old analogue typewriter tinkling to a light musical accompaniment.”
“…a musical incantation of similar ilk to that of Brahms might forge from musical structure, repeatedly cloning the main theme in a variety of disguises from vanilla and not forgetting the concluding fugue at the end, otherwise the music might decide to go on infinitely. The written melody was comprised of the little squiggles and dots superimposed upon ruler lines counting as the source code of the sound emitted, another DNA of sorts. Though the bookending fugue was a complex musical form based on mathematical splicing of a simple musical idea — some of the notes simply relied upon the final double bar line from which it was clear where the music should stop downwind of the last musical note that was struck.”
“The fiends were ready for the battle and due to the multiplication of tangible bodies over the territorial boundary of space and time, measured by an extraterrestrial dimension beyond human reach, the demons came flooding over the natural threshold of chaos and entropy and from the other side of shadows into the light of Sol.”
Three relatively short sections of visionary power via the book’s own disarming style of rhythmically guileless complexity. The ‘sage planet’ and its far future or far lateral state of existence seen alongside the ‘he’ of Socrat-V7 and the ‘she’ of Cob-Irena — as filtered through a gradual accretion of plot and human characters in a combined linear and non-linear direction of accretion.
“After disappointing millennia, human contact relied upon the innumerable keyboards simultaneously co-operating with silicon cities welded grid by grid and frame by frame, buttoned to what look like fields of pastures green.”
“So being eaten alive by a land worm outside Jaye was the last thing people wished upon themselves.”
The long and the short of it is that, rhythmically or oscillatingly in and out of its own self-haunting sentences, one day it seems ‘easier’ to read than on other days when the book seems tantalisingly ‘al dente’ to read as it was in today’s two sections, one section short and the other long.
I loved the derelict house with the peculiar church spire and the shuddersome character of Arabella! And much else. Not so sure about a few other aspects in these two sections, but no doubt they will become clearer later, in hindsight. All being edgy signs of a book of worthy traction.
“: historically democracy was being consumed by a variety of dictators turning up as clowns in full makeup and paraphernalia — more about that type of charade later.”
“Pity Olympia didn’t have the senses of a termite creeping undetected towards the sky boat. However, he was distracted while viewing Olympia who he thought was strikingly alluring to look at, her skin covered with almost a glossy sheen and her body innocently loaded with wires and switches moulded carefully satisfying the usual body contours a human might take. From head to toe, the synthetic skin covered her Delphic surface area, and her icy glance was of sinister effect indicating she owned torpedo eyes.”
Two brief sections of uniquely insinuating style that certainly pile a plot’s ’uncanny’ strength on strength, as Olympia ventures alongside Nierman towards the sea’s broadcasting spider craft now seen to be on ‘jelly’ legs, where Pollymina somehow still woos Socrat-V7 in a most strange way, thus wooing a main-frame whose ‘life’ is now prophesised to be on land in a startling vision of it among humans at the very end of these two sections.
“The electrical turbines were brought forth before it was the turn of the digital artefacts: long may they reign. With the Fulcrum’s engines still running full steam ahead, there had been continual extrapolations from the population squawking into the square microphones.”
In the previous section, I imagined Socrat-V7 coming from the sea’s direction like ‘man’ once did primevally. Now we have ‘GOSUB’ following a Latin passage that presages Socrat-V7 taking us into outer space as new stage of evolution. A sense of hope. Some of the pronounal interactions between Pollymina and Socrat-V7 have to be read to be believed. One day those who will read today’s section of this book may well be whiling away their time on a similar once far- but now near-future journey?
There is some great writing in this section to please them, I guess. To do justice, I would have to quote the whole chapter. Leading to thoughts — amid earlier echoes in my mind of whirring turbine noise with steady pistons in this section — of Pollymina’s absent friend, Abi.
“Like the inclement weather, windiness that had riven the whole plateau, here too many may well have been ambushed by a similar virus.”
Read by me today, 21.1.24. And I see that the bic-penned and Greek lettered individuals are now ‘famous’, as all spear-carriers should be, each reader of this book, too. Another mighty section that crosses boundaries where we start to gain accretive glimpses of things I’ve never glimpsed before, you, too, no doubt, viz, what it’s like to be involved with two main computers, Socrat-V7 and Cob-Irena, with gender pronouns, each in ‘bonding-loop’ with the other, and the mention of ‘artificial intelligence’, too, and ‘avuncular didactics’, and some of the book’s other characters, Michalis, Andrej etc., accrue actions that define them via their chemical body mulch and brain power, all laced with factory megaphones, concepts of the virus, Solage base, Jaye seas, CPU, BIOS, more blue smocks (worn by autocrats, it seems) and blue-coloured ice. And to read this book in the best manner possible one should pay due, if not slavish, attention to this section’s own embedded and telling passage ever-resonating with these words…
“It could not trust any human to cogitate properly the logical paths following any truthful fashion of their reality. Before returning to them the wisdom it had gained streaming bite-sized gossip, the microphone took from them that what was constant chatter. It extracted out of the booth a do tell narrative as filed directly from a syndication of information given by the subject.”
“ Mighty eyes like twinset belisha-beacons blinked open…” – Solage
(my italic portal, not the book’s)
National Amber Warning just established!
The next section is almost a standalone horror story, a horror potentially for humanity in general, but with all the implications of the book’s context embedded in it, as Piquadador and his ventriloquism insidiously come to bear on Pollymina’s interaction with Socrat-V7. There is too much quotable here to choose as examples! I shall be pleased when this book (that I know for a fact has been worked upon as their first book since 2011 by a close family relative) is generally available for others to read for themselves. I am currently using an advance copy.
“As a smaller boat compared with the Rose Fulcrum, this sky yacht was a beautiful specimen; before construction the water bird was copied out onto blue parchment from an ideal form attributed to many similar barges ornately designed depicting valour — each being slender and provided with three silken sails uniformly curved towards the sun and attached to two solar masts designed according to the sailor’s preference.”
That stylish beauty of scene contrasts with the bitter battle of wills that’s taking place in its vicinity. A highly cinematic scene where the dramatis personae are ‘audited’. And the plot pans out, too, nip and tuck. Piquadador, “authoritarian mountebank”, master of the spidery manse, with angry genuflects and windmill arms, still the horror villain with his own hoodlums, someone with his own ‘italic portals’ in his big speeches to camera, and Pollymina trying to escape him with the bolt gun already taken by the yawning ground, as she once tried to escape the ‘clock beetle’, and for a while she is now succeeding, but she sees not her own reflection in a puddle but Violet’s mugshot, unless I am mistaken. All such action accentuated by one easily missable glimpse explicitly towards YOU the reader as if through a fourth wall, you being implicitly glimpsed by a drone even though you do not glimpse the drone at all without such a penetration of the fourth wall!
“Piquadador would be a potent force provided Olympia and himself worked exactly as if they were conjoined at the hip. So far, they were separate entities supported by two legs apiece, one a flesh dossier with electronic matter extracted from Violet’s leftovers, the other boasted he was a man bred from the larvae derivatives plentiful on the insect farms.”
You will need your wits about you reading this narrative as if written by an omniscience that somehow seems likely to be embedded in all the readers allowed to read it, a narrative sometimes firmly on-all-fours, sometimes tottering on two legs, my own metaphors for its (I know this is an over-used word but here it happens to be true) UNIQUE style. Also a UNIQUE plot, and I should know this to be the case, if you can do a stocktake of all the works that I have submitted to this type of book review over many years on this website, a working experience on my part now constructively subsumed by this book’s still evolving gestalt made up of multiple scenarios and multiple eras of time, convening a virus, a famine, waging wars, computers’ brainstorming with, inter alia, ‘saltwater organisms’, plus gradually developing human characters good and evil, and a gradually comprehendible SF plot via tantalisingly evading turns of phrase, and here today is more than just a reconvening of SOC and COB, there is even a sort of appearance by Socrates himself. In these sections as read today, we journey from ‘obscure loop to loop’ to an ‘immaculate conception’ as borne out by some of the factors above. A passion of the reading moment that will stick with me, I trust, as I proceed even further into this book.
“The worm quickly gazed at the last man standing.”
Edwardian music hall and swelling tongues etc, today’s sections deploy body horror fiction at its most effective, a scenario by turns monster-monstrous, mainframe-monstrous and human-metabolising, and I will not spoil it all by giving here reasons why it is so effective, although a lot of it stems from the book’s style to which any reader will have grown acclimatised having read this far into the book, nor shall I hint at how it affects the plot itself, and which main characters become disposed-of as spear-carriers and, indeed, whether such disposals are only temporary. The aura of the old TV series ‘Blake’s Seven’ comes to my mind sometimes?
“Precise locations still confused ‘her’ for the march across vector coordinates was not preconceived, it was discovered slowly by trial-and-error tactics.”
These two sections headed THE TROUSER PEOPLE seem so compelling, I have decided to place them here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/6372-2/ as a whole crucial sample. If interested, please request the password from me at: dflewis48@hotmail.com. These sections represent an apotheosis of this book in the human-like rapprochement of SOC and COB, in the context of their ‘genders’ and the contextual plot-lines such as the use of Elégiac and our human destiny and much else — and the sections also provide a prime example of this book’s use of its own nurture of a uniquely disarming style when placed in contiguity with such plot-lines and concepts so as to provide the book’s inspiring and/or anxious visions to the optimum. A calling of some hope in my ears echoing along with the last two words of these two sections of the book: ‘Mayday Mayday!’
This review continues here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/01/26/solage-by-ashley-n/