THE MACARONI PEOPLE
The Macaroni People did exist in fashionable eighteenth century history, but enough of them! You can look them up. This single mention is more than enough. I want to talk about the Macaroni People today or, as some call them, the Macaroni Madness, even the Macaroni Miracle, depending on one’s point of view. ‘Elbow Pasta’ — look this up, too! — is a form of Macaroni. Yet, when, in these days, politicians tend to be straight up and down, or soft in the middle, either divisive or all-embracing, it’s important to get terminology right. Covered in cheese. Or with sugar and raisins, as a more wiggly form of the rice pud one was given in the old school canteen. Macmillan was prime minister then. And he said we never had it so good. Well, I begged to differ. Now I begin to agree.
Only last night I was visited by figures on wobbly stilts and they sported what I can only call macaroons as heads. In the days of the Lyon’s Corner House, such cakes were part of the choice on silver tiered cakestands that stood among the teapot and teacups, when listening to the Max Jaffa ensemble in the corner of the room, a corner with a small c. A house made of corners, and cream cornets as companions for the macaroons. The architecture outside had a frontage of leering mascarons (look the latter up on Wikipedia!)
Indeed, Lyons without lions, just rows of gurning masks. And the Macaroni Medley played on mandolins for the teatime customers to swoon at. The clink of cup and saucer just one ingredient to accompany the arrival on stage of living mannequins upon taller, sturdier stilts, more like uncooked spaghetti than al dente manicotti. The scrape of chalk on some hidden blackboard made me think of the school canteen again, and the miniature dumplings that were often as hard as bullets. Treacle tart was only just around the corner. Daydreaming with a small d is never the same as being back in the Good Old Days for real. Towards the end of my life, I often soar with my eyes into the sky to see the true epiphany of Macaroni Madness as the shapes of people wavering like shadows with loose olecranons, miraculously as high as the clouds are. Look up at them!
***
THE LITHOGRAPH
It was difficult for Don to judge whether it configured a single face or two human figures standing up in a boat ready to dive into the sea. Whatever the case, by evidence of its feel to Don’s fingers, he sensed it was a lithograph not a print. More suitable for a vibrant ghost story than an exercise in surface pareidolia. The meaning of the ‘p’ word just used by Don — opaque to many — was a portal to an inner depth below the surface, indeed a visualisation towards shapes of new meaning.
He shook his head. Whom was he talking to or writing for when expressing the above words? He placed in his mind’s eye a face of a stranger, a plain but strangely attractive female face, and the rest of his thoughts were addressed to that person whoever she was. Already, he somehow knew her and he believed that she knew him. Was she connected to the face he had first visualised in the near-abstract lithograph or maybe the two figures in the boat were connected to this woman in some story plot he had yet to be told by another person or by himself. The next question for Don was to wonder why he was referring to himself in the third person singular.
“Don, what’s the matter?”
The voice had not objectively come out of the blue. Equally, Don had completely forgotten that he was unalone in the cellar room, where candlelight struggled with the draughts from what he remembered as the coal bunker’s door to the outside. Thus he was duly startled by the sudden non-arrival of a ‘visitor from Porlock’. Non-arrival because the visitor had been present all along.
Don felt the surface of the lithograph again, as if giving himself time to dwell on what his answer should be. This action served to give his hand something to do instead of staring blankly into the other’s eyes. A reason for delay, to explain his stony silence, while seeking his answer amidst the aged undulations of the lithograph’s design and its ink’s mineral contents. Some of the random scratches of wear and tear seemed part of the design that he had tried to fathom by a combination of an independent pareidolia and the whimsy of a ghost story he had simultaneously told himself. Scored lines on dark draughty walls, he somehow thought. Light that was managed by means other than candles.
“Nothing is the matter, my dear.”
Although it was his answer, he realised it wasn’t his own voice. Nor were the voice’s words ones he even understood. The voice and the words were more ancient than that, even neolithic. And the watery wavery light fell into a strangely strange darkness.
***
ANYTHING GOES, ANYTHING BUT
It was called Deep River, but it was anything but.
With a nightwatchman’s house little more than a hut,
A township where simply anything went,
And that meant its days of Truth and Consent.
And today much goes, simply everything goes,
And jolly townsfolk strode in espadrilles and finest hose.
But a rogue element set alight the night hutch house
And turned this jolly verse into unscanned and unrhymed prose.
You see, inland Deep River had a dry dock as its central point, to which no deep river led. Indeed, no river at all. This made no sense without a strong element of truth and consent. The fact that a huge ocean liner sat between the huge plinths of the dock’s work area, swarming with working hands, and proving that mind over matter actually served its purpose while the economies of scale in Deep River gave much to do for the mischief makers to be scorched free of their mischief and who might have otherwise torched the night hutch first. Busy hands keep contented minds, many claimed, keeping such hands themselves from being nasty hands. Yet, at least one rogue always existed in every community and this particular rogue thought that the nightwatchman had scored with his wife in the eponymous house that now lay in ashes near the dry dock. Not many ashes as it was still ever the remains of a hut or night hutch, not a night house at all. Just a few wispy flakes of ash beneath the towering dock. Never to be noticed unless someone remembered what such ashes once were. Since then, everything went. Even consensus became a mistaken rabbit hole into which truth vanished forever. Sill waters never run deep, never run even shallow. Metaphors mere empty hoses to hose down hulls or wheelhouses. At best, footwear as casually buckled flats not deep-shod shoes at all.
Deep River was anything but what it wasn’t most.
The Night House the mere shimmer of a watery ghost.
And vast shapes come and go nightly from the dockside struts,
No-one woken to see them coming and going like tiny buts.
***
HOLD YOUR HORSES
Not that Boss Jenner knew anything about horses. He had never been near a horse, let alone groomed or ridden one. Yet, his favourite expression when facing someone who appeared to be acting impulsively was ‘hold your horses’ and then go on to explain why such metaphorical horses should thus be held.
Imagine a situation, therefore, where Boss Jenner encountered a horse in real life completely beyond the context of what had transpired before such an encounter. Out of the blue, quite unpremeditated, he lurched forward with his head, or his nose did if not the rest of his head. More a leaning motion than the presumed lurching, in hindsight. He could not believe his eyes as he caught sidewise his own reflection in what he later found out to be a Horse Mirror that was once common in certain areas of time when grooming. The nose was slowly stretching like a piece of abstract art worthy of preserving, had that been possible in those days. There was then no easy way of making permanent records of what one was constantly seeing moment by moment, as there was today. A series of static or stable images for posterity, either to incriminate felons or to award heroes. Even to make fine art from finding captures of the momentary and potentially momentous, a valued few of which clinchings or clickings could possibly be called monumental. Boss Jenner was ever to be part of such a framed cluster of splintered realities. One clinching in particular was being head to head with a horse, to the nature of which horse he had yet not been able to acclimatise himself. In racecourse parlance about close finishes, indeed, against the odds, a long head short of a nose.
The stabilised pen is still poised enough to write more, had this not fallen short of a never-ending horror story, instead of a fleeting ghost story as it now teeters upon becoming. Even a novel given, in hindsight, the now arbitrary but apparently careful choice of the protagonist’s name of Boss Jenner, a name that might have been intended for a novel stretched over time from start to finish. Fiction horseplay, it could be called. At optimum, a form of horse-trading between the art genres of literature and modern painting, but hopefully better than both, should time be allowed to quell any wanton impulses by whoever wrote this.
***
WATCH FROM THE START
The invitation seemed more tempting than ‘Watch Live’. Best to get at least a glimpse of the whole context in order to enjoy the middle and end. Hannah remembered the old days when cinemas regularly had continuous performances and one could enter and leave at whatever stage of the various screenplay storylines had been reached. It did not seem to matter, and, if Hannah agreed with my own views on this matter, one’s enjoyment and comprehension was not affected, in fact the middle-to-middle of some films was preferable to a beginning-to-end. Perhaps they once made films differently, fully expecting alternative timeloops in the audiences watching them.
In later years, with the arrival of VHS, I witnessed Hannah experimenting with the altering of the tapes so that she could watch old cinema films backwards. Whether that soon became easier with DVDs was a moot point because, by then, she had ceased finding backwards viewing a novelty to cherish, but the act of reflecting the circling sun upon a coloured surface of unintended colours was an audacious eccentricity to wave in the face of prescribed tradition, and Hannah indulged such a sense of new things happening every day to the extent of deliberately choosing to avoid internet streaming ab initio so she could end her life with something even newer. She created me. Complete with my own real memories of the past.
***
VIRGINIA CREEPER
Always wash your hands when preparing stuff for the kitchen oven; you don’t know what might have crept upon them. I sensed the Virginia Creeper was parthenogenetic and I had no duty to explain what I meant. I just knew it seemed to come from nowhere because it was not officially native to where I lived. And that it commonly climbed old buildings and some tall trees with its customary glow of redness in its leaves. I put out of my mind that it was poisonously inimical if one was careless with handling it and didn’t wash one’s hands thoroughly. No holds barred, my meanings are well hidden. No condescending to those who may read this tract purely in order to read the dubious existence of ghosts into every space between its printed lines. Even the sound of its words carried messages beyond their semantics. If it is too hot in the kitchen, nobody is preventing you from leaving. The oven needs to be hot so as to do its job. And indeed the creeper is climbing in profusion across the mansion walls towards the roof like a veritable conflagration. The finale of a horror film or an arson committed for insurance purposes? No it was all part and parcel of Mimi’s attempts to explain the nature of the ghosts that creep along with the creeper. Subtle ways of imparting them into tenuousness from nowhere, like virgin births or accidental prompts for artificial intelligence, without, at the same time, having to be explicit. To be plain about them would make the ghosts vanish, and she wished to encourage them, even to the extent of using these attenuations as a means towards the ends of helping her with existential angsts about other impending terrors that were far worse than ghosts. Ghosts at least had some ‘promise’ embedded in their existence, a proof of an after-life if you need me to be plain and simple. Mimi on the other hand felt no such qualms, dressed in her red hat and purple clothes that she used for socialising with like-minded people. Redness always climbs to the top, she thought, except if it’s one’s birthday; she smiled at the thought. She hired me to translate into plainness her endeavours in subtlety so that she could get her point across, and, so, I masqueraded, hidden in even plainer sight, as it were, dressed like a Morris dancer, my head decked in red leaves with wooden batons to beat upon other dancers’ wooden batons as we made arcane patterns upon the lawns and struck rhythmic noises in even closer vicinity with Mimi’s mansion’s vision of a burnt-out shell. I hope you get out of the kitchen in time. Forget the hands.
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. […] Her take on human affairs were deemed incredibly unique.”
Upon the beaten pavements of Colchester
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.
The Jumbo Tower, Colchester
I HAVE JUST RE-READ IN ONE SITTING ALL THE TEXT REPRESENTED BY THE THREE REVIEW ENTRIES ABOVE ENTITLED ‘The Water Carriers’. A BREATHLESS, UNPUTDOWNABLE EXPERIENCE. MY OWN REVIEW ENTRIES ABOVE SHOULD EQUALLY BE RE-READ, PLUS MY CONCOMITANT THOUGHTS THAT INSTIGATED MY PLANTING TWO OLD PHOTOS OF MINE ABOVE, THE BEETLINGLY TALL JUMBO OF AN ANCIENT WATER TOWER. THEN THAT MADE ME THINK AGAIN OF ‘the quick tidy up’ IN THE CLOCKHOUSE ESTATE OF COULSDON NEAR TO THE OLD CANE ASYLUM ALONGSIDE THE HISTORY OF COLCHESTER CITY AND ITS ELEPHANTS.
FROM JUMBO TO ‘jibber-jabber’ AND ‘wibble-wobble’ WITH WORMHOLES AND OTHER WORMS. POLLYMINA WITH ABI AT THE BACK OF HER MIND OR IN FULL SIGHT. WHO IS WHO AND WHEN? A GHOST STORY AS A FORM OF LOVE STORY AMID JACK VANCE AND DH LAWRENCE OF THE DYING EARTH AND THE BOWENESQUE LARCH COURT. “She went on as if her words were set to music.” ALSO ADDED MENTIONS OF EGGS IN INCUBATION, DESPOTS, A ‘tidal ambush’, TAPS AND NOZZLES. AND MUCH ELSE THAT STILL PERCOLATES IN MY RE-READING BRAIN.
I AM NOW TRULY AMONG “those who had entered the spirit of Pollymina’s soirées, garden parties and such social enigma calculated to camouflage Abi’s appearances and disappearances.”
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.”
“Besides, Captain Phi was not to be taken seriously. There was no way of knowing what he was thinking so long as he existed as an anomaly amongst your narrator’s population of characters. With a capricious hyperactivity to mix up his decisions, he made an aeronautic U-turn….”
IN TUNE WITH THE REVIEW ENTRY’S DETAILS IMMEDIATELY ABOVE, MY RE-READING TAKES ME INTO NEW CHANNELS OF SELF. THE CHARACTERS ON THE EDGE OF NOW TRULY COMING ALIVE, EVEN ANY SPEAR-CARRIERS AS WELL AS WATER-CARRIERS.
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 out of 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 ‘vexed texture of text’ but is potentially and 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 linear and non-linear 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
Quoted from toward the end of Solage:
“He cherished both, Pollymina and Abi also in the same breath, Abi and Pollymina. That was the nub of the matter. His woe begotten existence depended upon choosing his company between the musical presence of Florestan and Eusebius. At any rate, his emotions bore a trace of the elegiac in natural form but still at any price, the wave patterns collapsing and ever rotating around and around his conscious mind, no end in sight.”
Cf Schumann
I HAVE NOW REACHED ‘FINISH’ IN MY RE-READING OF THIS BOOK, THE TEXT FOR THE ABOVE TWO REVIEW ENTRIES HAVING BEEN ABSORBED IN ONE FELL SITTING AS IF STANDING ON MY NEW- FORMED READING-LEGS FOR THE FIRST TIME. AND, IN ADDITION TO MY ORIGINAL DETAILED REVIEW ABOVE OF THE SECTION HEADED ‘Abi’, TWO ‘bleeding chunks’ OF IT BEG FOR SPECIAL PIN-POINTING AS A RESULT….
“Worst of all this last bit of technology had inherited the same sort of characteristics as the abandoned water tower Pollymina explored with Petrioc. Salvaged from dereliction, their rocket was well meaning enough to reach beyond the earth’s atmosphere: a barren potpourri of corrosion, metallic joists, giant bolts, sunken holes and controlled entropy, purpose built to voyage beyond the sky’s limit. Made from junk, the surrounding materials were considered a great asset to make an escape pod. A few warp engines contriving four piers filled with rocket fuel were gambled upon and managed by those modest accoutrements the trouble dump could spare. To get the whole gang out of the way and off to a new civilisation, other technological blobs remained and possibly full of lost children spinning around the locale without purpose. Ambition was sewn into space travel as more of the sky-ships were reserved for such upward propulsion. Their actions were just as amazing as they were audacious breaking free from the tight pull of earth’s gravity and into the sunless nighttime of outer space.”
“Great flat plexiglass screens operated growing out of themselves eventually to form a through portal to somewhere else unlike anything seen on earth, for example observation of a particular star’s collapse after it is ready to die. The supernova was at the frontier of visibility and beyond the speed of light, existed other things, wonderful things —“
FROM ‘drippy, drip drip’ TO ‘dilly-dallying’ WITH A ‘snooper sneak’ ALONGSIDE ‘ink blot imps’ AND ‘a dip pen’, THE ‘quirk quirk’ ITALIC PORTAL SUMMONS A ‘pas de trois’ DANCE THAT MOVES THE WAY THE CHARACTERS MOVE, IN A PROPHETIC VERSION OF OUR WORLD WITH EVOLVING COMPUTERS AND DYING EARTHS.
AND NOTWITHSTANDING MY OWN CONNECTION WITH THE AUTHOR, WHO WROTE THIS BOOK FROM 2011 TO 2023, AND THE FACT THAT THE AUTHOR HAD READ VERY LITTLE OF MY OWN WORK UP TO THAT POINT, I CAN SAFELY SAY IT IS UNIQUE IN ALL SENSES OF THE WORD, AND ENORMOUSLY WORTH EVALUATING AS A MAJOR CLASSIC.
IN VIEW OF ITS INTENSELY AND HYPNOTICALLY ADDICTIVE NATURE, I INTEND, IN SIX MONTHS,’ TIME, TO READ THIS BOOK FOR A THIRD TIME, READING IT STRAIGHT THROUGH WITHOUT PUBLIC COMMENT, HAVING, WITH THESE WORDS, RETIRED FROM GESTALT REAL-TIME REVIEWING AFTER SIXTEEN YEARS. A SATISFYINGLY NATURAL AND FIT CLOSURE IN THE SCHEME OF THINGS.