SOLAGE
FROM THE CHRONICLES OF THE SUN (2023)
CONTINUED FROM PART SIX HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/01/26/solage-by-ashley-n/
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.
THE WATER CARRIERS
“Travelling through the night, as distinct from the day’s fiery crest, two lost children would move within the oblique night shadow that way, the shade of day.”
Pollymina and Petrioc? Pollymina and Abi? Or two other lost children? You will discover when you read this book.
I may be biased but I somehow feel, carried in my own water, as the expression goes, that I have something important to consider vis à vis this huge book. Difficult to generalise, to pin down, to evaluate or even to transcend it beyond its own tentative certainty, it begs to be read again and again on several levels. I know — from when this author was writing it in 2011 until late last year — that they had read very little of my own fiction work, and, not surprisingly, it has in fact turned out to be entirely distinct on its own terms with, just as one example, its unique italic portals. Meanwhile, it has strongly appealed to my narrative sensibilities since first reading it in the last few weeks in its completed form.
The first third of the next section headed ‘The Water Carriers’ is a case in point, as I re-enter the level of a younger Pollymina and Abi, when under the tutelage of Arabella, involving Jumbo Juggernaut and the learning processes of growing from infanthood into their slow motion future, memories of Larch Court, involving, inter alia, an arching superstructure, folded creatures, Bluey the cat again, weather systems, a tower that is rusty inside as if once a container of water, and in the girls’ future, talking to Abi as a dead ORACLE, plus an italicised poem that I found effective, a hull in the branches of a tree (is Pollymina now that owl again up there?), a broken printer, the jarring of lockdowns, a lost AI system, aBi as a ‘tomboy’, would the latter be allowed to live on to old bones? (I have read this section up to that reference of ‘old bones’.)
“I’m quickly fatigued and must sleep again soon but I warn you not to take too much trouble upon your chest. The world does not turn on regret — there is still much for you to do. Working through magic and entropy, something far older and wiser is at work here beyond our control.”
“Everyone loved Pollymina’s parties. People even dreamed about being left a piece of her, a parting gift tucked away in their doggy-bag at the end of the night, also to simply coincide along her timelines, perhaps to stay with her and discover the strange yet unknown qualities the universe had revealed over millennia.”
The ‘do’ at Larch Court, whenever when, is one singular tour de force of writing and reading indeed. Giving a strong inadvertent taste of a certain mighty chapter in Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘A World of Love’, somehow tinged with elements of Robert Aickman and Walter de la Mare, in counterpoint to this book’s pervasive Vance and its gestalt version of semi-steampunk SF, dying earth and computer mechanics, laced with Muse and Music as visionary forces. The ‘do’, described initially as a dinner party, involves the wooing machinations of Öppenhoff, Pollymina and dead-or-alive spirit of Abi, and it makes me wonder if the love of the latter two is more Sororal than Sapphic. All leading, beyond an asterisk star, to some crucial considerations on Darwin based on the two girls’ sororal bantering. It has been a ‘do’ or party that involves many references including, for example, an ‘artificial sun’, ‘gentle mountain llamas’ in and among fir trees and shaggy treetops, a whole latticed panoply of the garden and a ‘boredom saver’, ‘a spell of general amnesia’, the more lurid things in the cellar flowing from the ‘lunar epidemic’, hugging beyond any lockdown rules, LYONESSE, clairvoyant communication, “one rampant ceiling boss hankering to be based on a bygone baroque design”, the girls and the ‘running bulls of Pamplona’, infusions of tea like Proust as well as Bowen and de la Mare, “dramatis personae currently on stage” alongside more info on Ms Violet as a village nuisance….
“Pollymina’s face was more gift-wrapped than a mask,… […] She went on as if her words were set to music.”
nullimmortalis Edit
I have now finished the few sections headed overall as ‘The Water Carriers’, and there is much about them that stimulates forthrightly as well as sometimes being evocatively fickle or fey. The book’s general style is disarmingly gauche and eloquently polished at the same time, a means of oblique communication that combines the idiosyncratic, some slang, the deadpan of inadvertence, the idioms of poshness as well as of commonality, the tongues of humans and fairies and computers alike. Also there are italic portals as a refreshing phenomenon plus certain passages that go into overdrive of expression, often taking the reader’s breath away. Some sentences that constructively frustrate the reader, too. The world of its language is utterly unique and eventually assimilable by the sensitive reader, if perhaps off-putting, at first.
This particular section ends with the potential of a great flooding by water pressure reminiscent of the finale of John Cowper Powys’ Glastonbury Romance, perhaps AS Byatt, too, some of so many elements which I find in this book of Solage, alongside all the other authors I have mentioned above, as well as Solage’e own intrinsic uniqueness. Today, inter alia, an elongated ostrich. The zigzag path, as mentioned explicitly in the text . A mausoleum and erstwhile mansion. Tenuto and Ostinato. Earlier in this overall section, as the great forest hunt transpires and the eggs proliferate and change shape as do some of the humans, and the two girls combat two villains (Bartholomew and Piquadador) within the conspiracies developed by this book about Elégiac, Eggs, Etc. And I wonder if Pollymina and Abi are simply friends of platonic and/or sapphic tendencies, or are they sisters, or, as I now begin to suspect, symbiotic ghosts as spirits or muses or alter egos. One dead the other alive, or vice versa. Separate, and as one? A constant balance between two souls outdoing and bolstering each other, like two stars in DH Lawrence. I can’t possibly itemise everything that has been happening in this section, and that is enough to be going on with, until I re-read this book, after due time has elapsed upon the finishing of reading it once! I am relatively close to the end now with the first reading.
ÖPPENHOFF
“The weather drove the ship along so that it skipped through the waves in a fashion unlike a normal gravity hugging craft, lurching as it quickly travelled a course for calm or solace.”
This swashbuckling and high-romance section featuring Öppenhoff, Bartholomew, Abi, and eventually Pollymina in her wingèd form, reminds me creatively and perhaps inadvertently of the quick-changing music and lyric style of the ‘Jive Bunny & The Master Mixers’ pop hit in the 1980s as well as of the sea-borne chapters of Barth’s (not Bartholomew’s!) ‘The Sot-Weed Factor’, this being one of my favourite ever novels of yore. Drippy, drop, splish, splosh. Both those tentative comparisons could arguably apply to the whole book, along with all the other comparisons I have already made. It is, though, as I say, a new Solage as itself throughout. Pump up the volume. It is full of burning down into a drowned shipwreck or going upward as a sea ship into an airship, a resurrection of such ‘naufrigio’ amidst rivalries in the Elégiac drug trade out of Jaye Quay, radio masts on the ‘Rose Fulcrum’, and the ‘Aurora Borealis’, etc. etc. Öppenhoff and Bartholomew each on competing ships, the former man in emotional rapprochement with Abi, and Mr φ is now a ship’s captain! Read it for yourself and get tangled in its tantalising or infuriating nets, and perhaps you will never regather enough breath to read any book again! No exaggeration. Beyond any sought-for ‘calm or solace’!
A few taster sample passages:
“Given the information-loop under his jurisdiction, the captain would not be quoted on anything he had personally witnessed to anyone below rank, including his take on the Rose Fulcrum disaster.”
“Once Öppenhoff had lost his lively chaperone, he left the country to serve in the court of the recyclable captain riding onto furious white horses, a junkie of the sea like himself not to mention φ’s simple idea of selling Elégiac to those disposed to crave it.”
“By shooting up a gaze at the ancient sun, in tandem with the earth his body spun and shifted around the orb in an ellipse shape withholding consent to breach its contract from the gravitational pull we all must obey with no questions asked. Again, Öppenhoff stalked about deck as if in sympathy with the giant pancake of an elderly star.”
“From that of a girl delinquent to a fully-fledged woman, she stretched with limbs totally mutated into wings capable of flight. She took their hands respectively and yelled at them at intervals, much like in the style of an augmented fourth, a chord that sounded something akin to a honky-tonk piano.”
I have so far read up to:
“…he entirely forgot all about her and his dear Abi. Were they both separate parts of a whole? he thought.”
ABI
“As soon as the singing taps of water filled the land with a transparency, he recovered his bearings with expeditionary force intent looking past the fog dunes surrounding neighbouring flood saturated lands and somewhat submerged in mud. He decided to budge and take care of a hard journey into the wilderness, leave this land of woe behind.”
This beginning of the end is very satisfying to me, not necessarily tying up all the loose ends of the achronological plot neatly, but giving a sense of fulfilment and greater understanding of the whole book and its characters in hindsight. And to achieve this, it uses some more passages of writing that take the reader’s breath away, passages that I have left unquoted here, and some other passages with the al dente traction of frustration equally left unquoted, too. The ones I have quoted above and below are the ones that have special meaning to me.
Dealing with the plague symptoms, the blast off from the planet, the Valkyrie in interface with the Trouser People, the giant sun strangling the earth, self-referential “fictional circumstance” and the pages one is a turning by reading this explicitly intertextualised ‘tale’.
‘Dry docked’ by The Cane or bamboo stick, and an ‘abandoned water tower’. And the ‘coven of stevedores’ that I forgot to mention in the previous chapters of water carrying, flood and sea. All off kilter and true.
“…accessorised to pick up a phantom’s interpolation.”
“Although he always carried Abi’s memory like perfume into the long dunes of his later life, Pollymina had pushed him way back to where he was — in no-mans-land where there was no avoiding the need for acceptance as a qualification for solace.“
“…the pitch-and-put alley. For it was there that the real golf balls were up for sale.”
“…dialect — speech patterns varying across borders and countries produced here on tap…”
“…an ugly metallic cone on the bay in which he had melted into.”
I have read so far up to:
“You are good to go! Be free!”
“In our story any such meeting between two characters is never a triviality.”
This second half of ‘ABI’ is even more than I would have expected for a fine ‘FINISH’ as is now wrought by this book. A book that takes the taste of Walter de la Mare’s ABO from the reader’s mouth. I can only repeat what I stated in the previous entry above. And the text has even expressed thus the reading of it through its own words:
“Each body of the dance was orientated into a frozen stance running to the four corners of the room and to affect a unison in the form of a knot twisted with limbs to occur at the point the protagonists came back together at the room’s central axis.”
And through the ballroom dance of ‘pas de deux’ and ‘pas de trois’ featuring all and sundry, Larch Court manse now clock-beetled or as a vessel in contiguity with an Ark of animals, as well as quantum physics and Darwin’s natural selection again….and much more of its themes and plot of characters. The Null Immortalis of Abi and Pollymina. The come-uppance of others. “…sprayed him with a noxious substance, unknown in origin,…” The Sandman of Olympia now etched with ‘found art’. The prose style is not so much a gauche or vexed text but is fundamentally elegant while being as fractured as Elizabeth Bowen’s style has long been said by others to be ‘fractured’, but here SOLAGE is fractured in a different way, and has healed itself. Jack Vance’s Dying Earth reborn in disguise. And much more, musical or otherwise. Italic portals, computer lore, Jaye’s sea and all.
A satisfying ending but leaving much to follow in its wake. No spoilers here. Except I shall give some more passages below that seem important to me from this final section, even if they turn out not to be your own favourite passages when you eventually read this book…
“— toy dolls were returned intact to the doll’s house at last.”
“…the empty husks of the white oval eggs widely dispersed across the desert.”
“Outside the ruins, she found a broken telephone receiver that after eons, could not carry the sound waves it was invested to emit. Moribund in structural usefulness to mimic other voices, she anticipated the part of her dead companion and specifically addressed Abi using mouthed words through the broken handset.”
“The dip pen held a little friction as they scratched the thirsty paper holding sway eagerly as if the mark it made also did the thinking. The pen glided across as the ink spurted out from the nib fountain spreading out to make a series of blotches in the form of code.”
“…imagine about a life filled with fairy harebells dancing in the silvery dew,…”
“The narrator ventures to add that a ventriloquist’s mouth tends to lay open like a man trap snapping open every so often if only to catch an unwary listener caught napping.”
For listener, please read reader!
***
In honour of the book’s final flourish of a ‘sacred loop’, I intend to read the book again in due course, with my short sub-comments in upper case letters appended to each original comment entry above, from the beginning of this review back to its end here. Creating a palimpsest not unlike the book’s own palimpsest.
From earlier in the book’s pages…
“It was enough space for a continuous track, more than adequate for a train with full steam ahead capacity and was compared with the legendary Forth Bridge — a similar monument-built eons ago crossing over into a foreign land.”
FINISH