FROM THE CHRONICLES OF THE SUN (2023)
CONTINUED FROM PART TWO HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/14/solage-by-nimbus-ashley-2/
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.
My reading today from Solage represents some great passages of wondrous gaucheness transcended not only by its elegance but also by both the tiny and the vast, i.e. from the duplex far too small seemingly to house Bartholomew and his so-called ward Pollymina whom we see here developed into a budding central heroine, as she is both somehow trapped by the computer screen as young people are today but simultaneously expanded beyond it as if it is her own duplex Tardis arguably as a sort of Dr Who herself, although I wonder whether this is Solage’s own bookish intentions. Indeed, Pollymina’s potential dalliances with the local lads are subsumed by her dating connections with the mainframe Socrat-V7, and you surely must give up some of your own time to time-travel, by reading these passages, through a unique narrative evolution unfolding before and no doubt after it. Too many quotable quotes, so I shall quote none this time.
Some loose notes today…
Firstly, please forgive a long quote today, to compensate for yesterday, giving below admittedly only a part of this section’s landmark pen picture of the mainframe Socrat-V7 with its own architecture and (via mainframe to mainframe) its background love affair with Pollymina….
“There were no personnel working through the night to apply the brakes because the ancient machine operated on its own command remotely sealed up inside a vacuum tank so that no curious human might tamper with its inner components, not even to lay a glove on the many gauges that were suspended above protected against Trojan Viruses. / Socrat-V7 endlessly translated the mundane, finding value from the hum-drum life experience people encountered. Sometimes there were gems: a divorce, a juicy piece of marital infidelity, a favourite meal gone wrong, something of mirth or the odd mental health issue. The machine was intent upon turning it into some quote other people could abide, but people seldom submitted anything more important than a story about walking the pets.”
I, as quoter, cheekily inserted the italics above as my own co-opted italic portal or wormhole in the quoted text! “ho hum”.
There are also many new genuine italic portals in this relatively short section read today. Talking about pen pictures above, there is here the return of whom I am told are ‘bic pen’ characters, μ & φ, but whom I would rather call spear-carriers, and they are enlisted to deal with a virus aboard Socrat-V7.
I read most of Jack Vance’s work many years ago but they have by now slipped through my ageing brain, whilst I am now told that his writing soul may live on at least to some extent in the Solage book?
Finally: “…it wasn’t for nothing, she [Pollymina] was known as the Nimble Fairy, a nom de plume adopted whenever she used the messaging…”
“Both partners needed toxins imbibed from the unfathomable Elégiac drug, something to accelerate the functionality a love match required to create more human beings in wedlock.”
Two sections today re Michalis and Olympia respectively, with much material that seems gestalt-instinctively correcting for our times by extra-creatively solving such times’ difficulties, via word-portals or -wormholes, the glitches of genius versus the herein once prophesied AI onset, and via a bond-looping psychology amid the wastelands of Solage, we tussle with interpersonal squabbling, the Cane Asylum, a ‘team of tiny dopamine midgets’, the ‘crime of war’, ‘the brink of a coda’, and the ’same old’, ‘a future yet to be invented.’
“Throughout the land there was a settled boredom turned topsy-turvy in thesis, and retrospectively, every linked antithesis was possible to divulge.”
nullimmortalis Edit
“The dinghy assigned to hell was a form of transport designed specifically for those who posed as criminal types in the real world. Olympia bore their accumulative guilt during a present-day reverie.”
I am told that these earlier sections were first written up to twelve years ago and they certainly possessed portals into now. Even into yesterday when the author and I were, by happenstance, clearing out a cupboard. This section is a cupboardful of memories and music, ‘embossed grooves’, maybe bakelite and vinyl in a digital age, soon to be AI. And black and white photos of Clamforth. To be absolutely Franck, this is the most seminal section so far, and it needs to be repeatedly read and absorbed; indeed it is alone worth whatever you paid for the privilege of being able to read this book. I hope the author does not mind me quoting two ‘bleeding chunks’ (an italic portal explicitly used in a timely fashion within this very section’s text), the second chunk being…
“Only casual reflection much later in her life caused the uneasiness she felt on how her family background was linked with the objects she had inherited. After opening the two arched cupboard doors, Olympia found the grime covering each folio amazingly frequent. Dusty fragments were flying grey motes resembling a force field against her less than temperate curiosity. Up above she visualised tape loops placed neatly filling the shelf space with their cylindrical towers connected to each reel stacked up together as one entity — the reels were more foreboding than the circular records as there were no pictures embossed on the front lamination bearing such tidings as to what music would be contained within.”
Another section that makes the reading-mind morph out of shape in more ways than one, most of these ways being welcome inspirations. I riffle my fingers through the rest of the pages of this giant book with great anticipation, while believing, despite my connection with its author, that I can safely state that we have here a major work with a genuine unique and tantalising tone for our times.
Today’s section reveals Pollymina in Jaye with its seaside genius-loci and her ‘probation officer’ Nierman and she is also in interface with a proposed lover in the form of the mainframe Socrat-V7. If you reach this far in the book, you will duly receive your flame-licking badge! Meanwhile, a ‘bleeding chunk’ I could not resist quoting…
“ Pollymina though feverously impulsive, often felt compromised asking directions from the unsympathetic boat hands lounging against the sea wall whose rough dialect for the most part, hardly made sense. These sailors often spoke in riddles to strangers who bombarded them with their careless land talk. Jaye sailors were the worst of all. Their crazy accent often avoided by holiday makers requested that they be sent away on endless excursions around the several marker buoys placed offshore.”
“From the mighty to the meek they shambled through the numerous semi opaque glass structures, each holding a lamp emitting a dullish light over the dusty crazy paving chalk symbols scratched over blackboards cheek by jowl with the dialectic hieroglyphs denoting the overreaching umbrella equation comprised of everything in the universe.”
Two sections read today as a series of ‘nuggets’ or ‘pellets’ and bleeding-chunks alongside a ritual passage of humanity in interface with the sun as SOL and man-made, man-mad machines-as-machine. In Interface with the rarefied thoughts of Pollymina in youth and AGE followed by the human (?) or who-man spear-carriers or Bic Pens with Greek-looking letters, and much more.
“Socrat-V7 existed as a worthy champion for this, a collective exercise in salvation, a machine churning out lofty truths during a confused age where on a mass scale its peoples suffered from amnesia. […] …the machines encouraged anarchy, mostly because ‘they’ did not understand ‘them,’ their flock.”
“A swarm of faith based play-acting acolytes were eager to lash out in revenge and of course, the Trouser People were on the move vouchsafing their human rights against the diversions instigated by the state-run war. Rumour had it that the dragons were returning,….”
An inner soliloquy by Olympia via the filter of this Solagist device disguised as a book — as the rest of her life pans out post Alani, with her becoming a wartime nurse and involved with the radio transmissions of the mainframe in Jaye, I infer, and we meet other people like Ali Twain as well as some lettered coordinates of emotional geometry. This book continues to brush nerve endings other books can’t reach, but so far I can’t nail down exactly how it does this and toward what eventual gestalt!
“…the ever-younger Pollymina — her beliefs, as far as he could understand them, were pure hyperbole, most probably by the absurd argument that Socrat-V7, with arching girders ranging over her head from a central fusion point, was decided as a fitting subject for her hand in marriage, a predicament from which he surmised Pollymina would not allow herself to contemplate being just as single as before.”
Though, this section is not really about Pollymina, but more about Violet (whom we first met much earlier as a local chemist serving cough medicine in the same paragraph as Olympia being called the Tickler) and Bartholomew and his allotment, and a B&B in the post-famine era, and about Olympia herself and the etymological mechanics of the Olympia name. I won’t go into details, but this section also includes a remarkable description of a kiss and ‘canoodling’.
“…the mechanism widely known as the great sunrise.”
“Cob-Irena’s many electrical conduits cascaded around her development of a digital pattern-image representing Petrioc as he were to be reimagined via a subservient code procedure. They could both live somewhere in technological space beyond the plexiglass screen where he is fulfilling its every desire. Although the unit was an artificial intelligence by instinct, within its programming jargon there was the added strain of human dissemination. In the current plane of existence, Cob-Irena existed within its depot, while Petrioc’s physical presence stayed outside the logic gate and far from its reach.”
Ironic and interesting that ‘logic gate’ is not in italics. Another ‘bleeding chunk’ quoted simply because I had to do so. There is so much else for anyone to quote, so you will lose nothing by the time you read this enormous book, enormous in body and mind. These two sections read today seem as if a particular type of friendly ‘artificial intelligence’ first visited this world in 2011 when this book was being first narrated by its narrator in these early stages, and it as if we have been provided a deadpan portal or logic gate into its mind as it writes a novel, disarmingly embellished by some elegant gaucheries, to appear as an SF work of fiction. AS IF.
There is much more captivating and tantalising us today about the Sunny View B&B, Olympia, Michalis, Petrioc, Bartholomew, Violet, a stone-cast triptych, the Marble Palace, the ‘cage’ weather computer perhaps for our weather today that is also, I may be mistaken, known as Cob-Irena…