FROM THE CHRONICLES OF THE SUN (2023)
CONTINUED FROM PART THREE HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/28/solage-by-n-ashley-3/
My continued review will appear in the comment stream below, as and when I read this book…
www.nemonymous.com
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.
“War inspired an epoch dedicated to both warriors and their dead bodies.”
Some glorious passages exemplified below from the next two sections, as various characters — with whom we are gradually getting to know through means other than the info dumps of standard novel-writing — are in interface with each other, with war, with courtly love, and machines, some machines sane, some insane towards humanity, and places like Jaye and Ì know a place that has wires like this…
“For these two star-crossed lovers, the method of communication was far more powerful in comparison to the network the telephone wires provided, crisscrossing the nation until there with no room for any more crosshatching over the town’s landscape.”
“The images had a kindliness akin to the soft curves gymnasts made when they threw their bodies in mid-flight, sometimes as if to finish with two hands in the air. For now, they were pin sharp and as warped as any other similar creature walking the earth.”
“All hexameter was derived from the gibberish humans had added to tattletale their history to future kind,…”
A novel that joins hands with its own devices! Irony piled on irony.
We are also granted an italicised passage from Michalis’ diary.
“There were no insides to the ship, just glass structures allowing one to sit or to lie in the customary position only humanoid bodies could fit given the long evolutionary journey to who-knows-where maybe with a what-if thrown in for good measure.”
“…a disembodied wraith. His eyes were twitching with a pair of enflamed gums gnashing together as if to practise a cradle song, sounding the tune out crooning from a pounding mouth ripe for the hideous quacking sounds he made later.”
A genuine tour de force of a section, as Pollymina, our putative heroine, boards the deck of the spider-craft as broadcasting-ship that houses Socrat-V7 (“the big fella attentively waiting in its hutch”) in her search of more than just courtly love if not the ‘Elégiac smuggled therein’, but it is in itself a suspenseful thrilling adventure created more suspenseful by the book’s deviously crafted style, in inimical interface with various named and unnamed spear-carriers. What that ‘more than’ actually IS, we are gradually getting our readerly minds evolved by these words that we read to grasp, involving concepts of ‘storm troopers’, a ‘side portal’, ‘fairy lordly ones’, and Pollymina compared to a ‘damsel in distress’ now perhaps lost within the ‘gut’ of the craft with ‘spidery legs’ or ‘feeling that the verve could make her dance’.
“…Pollymina decided her all-encompassing quest was for the pursuit of love and thirst for knowledge and infinitely, to compete for the posterity of humankind.”
“Piquadador stood his ground staring avidly up her upturned nasal cavity to find there a snout graphically represented by the infinity symbol. For he had already understood every other feature protruding from her face including her long strips of hair overreaching a futile grin, even the slightly alluring single red tinted curl over the left eyebrow; another fairer coloured blade stretched out over the other cheek arranged at full capacity.”
The above is a disarmingly beautiful opening to this interaction between Piquadador and Violet, a theatrical encounter where the mesmerising script (“…go you on rattling out threats and I’ll give you a whole island of misery to look after, a locked-up manse all to yourself”) seems a rich form of the Pinteresque and the stage directions as this book’s unique fiction prose seem like a very strange metamorphosis of Pinter and Beckett. And the subsuming by concrete seems paradoxically appropriate in the context.
Read up to: “An unhappy face, but never you mind that now — that’s for another story leftover for anon.”
Larch Court
“She wouldn’t be forced to become one of those dead-on-their-feet women dashing about trailing impossible dresses, women whose lives resulted in such pointless termini simply reacting to another-one’s restrictions.”
This section is a backstory as frontstory of Pollymina as a ‘kid’ where she was a sort of Evadne Price’s Jane Turpin (equivalent to the contemporaneous Richmal Crompton’s William Brown) — a very engaging portrait of a time, with the eponymous Court or Manse versus the crammed terraced housing and, inter alia, strange people to accost or be accosted by, and other relationships building up with Petrioc and Violet, characters like Pollymina being made more real, all potentially becoming clearer but paradoxically more fey or uncanny at the same time! To instil the uncanny into a reader through words, it adds to the uncanniness for the words themselves to be couched within an uncanny style unacknowledged that the style is uncanny at all. And the references
here to music and plainchant, climate catastrophe and plague, are uncannily as well as cannily grist to this narrative mill. See my happenstance concurrent review of the academic study of ‘The Uncanny’ here. Nothing ‘academic’, for me, about SOLAGE, I hasten to add. It possibly knocks the ten bells out of literature bell by bell.
“Below the lamp-lit canopy, the rain began to ease only with permission from the nimbus clouds hanging down not in the least bit disturbed by the farrago outside Larch Court.”
“So now I want that sun-rune found in your pocket slits, hand it over. Now!”
Much more evoked, sometimes shockingly, regarding Pollymina growing up and being even more hardened by interface with a bully called Arabella and with Violet and Petrioc and Socrat-V7 and the threat of the Cane Asylum ever in the wings, and also a gentler reference to Pollymina’s friend Abi.
In respect of Socrat-V7, I wonder if this novel (that was commenced in 2011 when, under cover of darkness the Post Office computer Horizon was plying its worst) was destined to be read by me today at the height of culmination — by a docu-fiction Tv drama as another example of real theatre — of that sad scandal of abnegation and careless cruelty, assuming there is indeed such a chiming between the two scenarios! And this book continues to evoke a new reality from a sense of ‘ostranenie’ (a word perhaps in preference to ‘uncanny’) along with the constructively vexed texture of text as an arguably preferable expression to being described as ‘elegantly gauche’?
“; even her classmates were puzzled by the clockwork mannerisms unexpected from her usual practice. Why was she behaving so awkwardly? Her opening eyes bore the echoes of the clouds folding over the sun —“
“Several nights in a row she watched out across the rowdy sea towards the chrome spider boat sitting with many a studio mast arranged geometrically around a central hub, each feathering a nest of cables.”
Another two sections that I think somehow reach certain nerve-endings or reading antennae no other book has so far achieved. But what do I know? I haven’t read every book. The nature of the strung-stone moon, the development of knowledge of people and computers and spider craft and weather elements, all as characters, even the spear carriers as well as Your Kingship, plus the italic portals, the self-haunted sentences giving oblique glances of human thought process twisted by experiences we have never had, the back story and outcomes for the world and its engine parts and human traits as yet unborn Platonic Forms. Above all in these sections, the rim of blue above the township of Jaye, staggeringly memorable, I predict.
NB: I draw attention to the REVIEW CAVEAT I issued in my 22 December entry above, and I hope this book will be available from the author in 2024.
There are some truly remarkable passages in the next two sections about Pollymina’s derring-do with her chivalry/ courtly love theme with Socrat-V7 as well as Flash Gordon or Indiana Jones type adventures within it, alongside interface with the aforementioned spear-carriers. These passages have great physical and philosophical bearing on humanity itself past, present and future, and I continue to be stunned by the perceived naivety of, say, LS Lowry with the complex and sometimes vexed expression of sophistication involved in much of this book. Instead of quoting a little bit from the text today, as is my usual wont, I have extracted a much larger section of prose HERE passworded for anyone seriously thinking of accessing this book once it is generally available. (It is an advance copy that I am reading.) Please request the password from me, which will be changed from time to time.
Clock Beetle
“But ma says she can see mauve everywhere.”
This is a fascinating section about a child’s instruction within a group and Pollymina as helpmate, the pervasive mauve echoing a later reference to Violet, and gangs echoing her own Jane Turpin type gang earlier. An educational feast ranging from memories of the threat of a naughty child’s home scenario to much more serious factors. I was enthralled from beginning to end, helped by the felt welcome within me that I now seem almost fully acclimatised to this book’s intrinsic style of constructive insinuation, nothing else like it anywhere, I suggest.
“For whatever entreaty worked its way back to Clock-Beetle, this being an entity based upon an array of metal tubes mounted with spiky impressions protruding from its skin, basically went unheard from under the coffin lid. Several such tubular packages were fed into oblong boxes — a second clockwork arrangement impossible to stop.”
A punk-steam-cyber-interzone tour de force for this book, viz. the textured evocation of the régime at the educational institution where Pollymina is helpmate, including the monologue by her ‘bestie’, Abi. Any disciplinary strictures seem to be under the amazing tutelage of Clock-Beetle. After the ‘electric barrel organs on a Sunday’ described earlier in this book and the previous section’s Scriabin reference yesterday to “Like their ancestors, pupils were encouraged to study the invisible colour spectrum as derived from the luce keyboard behind the lectern”, today there are reached certain elements that only Clock-Beetle can reach within any reader, I feel, who is, by now, acclimatised enough to continue absorbing this whole work in a growing rhythm of direct and lateral meaning.
“Oh well, a walk on Jaye Quay was another world, a positive stride to envisage a way forward, a state of life answerable to a more far-reaching objective — a wealth of radical views and imagination.”
We catch up with Olympia (‘chief midwife’) on Jaye Quay, post Alani, but in which of her life time-tranches?— her thoughts give clues and, whether apocryphal or not, I particularly enjoyed …
“…she hated being stared out by the many pirates standing tall on the radio-barges as if to judge her quickly and without much true understanding of her trauma. Much of the time they had gushed out fun rhetoric and allowed their loudspeaker to play music as often as possible, where previously there was silence. Olympia disliked such paraphernalia and refused to be cheered by them.”
And the engaging descriptions of Jaye Quay itself – the ‘Styx’ that was also mistakenly spelt, for me, today by coincidental memory of wheels and spokes…
And we catch up, too, with Barthlomew and Pollymina in whatever non-linear way we can manage, with telling references to the QWERTY keyboard and social media, ‘digital city stapled down onto a green plateau’, et al.
This review continues here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/01/15/solage-by-a-nimbus-5/