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Isinglass
He did this amazing wall painting, this mural�?�It was a city, a Paul Klee or a Max Ernst city, a city of the mind perhaps, or of antiquity. A dream city. It was a wonderful thing. It took a few days and nights to do, beautiful days and nights. All the other men who lived in the donga watched it come clear. They loved it. And then other men in the camp heard about it too and came to look. An unknown man comes ashore at a remote beach on the New South Wales coast. He is taken into detention and sent, ultimately, to Darwin. His captors call him Thursday after the day upon which he was found. Thursday doesn't speak, but instead paints an enigmatic mural on the wall of his donga in the detention centre. It is a city, a dream city, and when he finishes he says a single Isinglass. This latest offering from author Martin Edmond is a beautifully written portrayal of the shameful practices of the Australian gulag archipelago, and a compelling story of a man adrift in an unkind world.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2019
16 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 5, 2019
I have to confess to being baffled at first by this book... I did not understand how the book was coming together until I was almost halfway through it. But I am here to tell you that it is worth persisting...
The reader is on familiar ground in the very brief first part, 'Dark Point': it recounts the arrival of the unknown man referred to in the blurb (see above):
The second part titled 'Thursday' is more enigmatic. The narrator, in first person, is a journalist. He tells the story of his meeting with C, a former lover, not seen for many years. She brings Thursday to this man's attention, and she subsequently wangles a visit to the detention centre where she facilitates the painting of the mural by the silent man. C cares about Thursday, whereas for the narrator, the situation is more abstract, and in the course of this chapter, there are what appear to be digressions into theories which are difficult to grasp, and even more difficult to contextualise in terms of the novel's intent. Or so it seems, until it all falls into place as the novel progresses.
Part III is the story of Isinglass, narrated by Thursday and by good luck I have stumbled on part of this chapter at Martin Edmond's blog. Even if you never read the novel, I recommend you read this excerpt because it captures so perfectly the dilemma that all refugees face when they must choose whether to leave or stay. This chapter traces the journey of Thursday's people and the cities they subsequently build, all of which fail because it is human nature to create conflict out of religious beliefs, or the pursuit of power and possessions, or good old Mother Nature creating the chaos that enables cruelty and divisiveness to fester.
Thursday tells his story because he is a Rememberer, and it is in his description of hearing voices from the past that the 'digressions' from Part 2 begin to make sense. At C's urging, the narrator in Part 2 had bought a copy of a work called Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness , by Julian Jaynes. At the time of reading I did not know that Julian Jaynes was a real person, and that his book (which you can still buy) was influential in the development of the idea of a divided self and a 'bicameral mind'. The theory is explained in Isinglass and confirmed as authentic by Wikipedia:
Thursday's experience is an exemplar of this theory...
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/04/05/i...
The reader is on familiar ground in the very brief first part, 'Dark Point': it recounts the arrival of the unknown man referred to in the blurb (see above):
The second part titled 'Thursday' is more enigmatic. The narrator, in first person, is a journalist. He tells the story of his meeting with C, a former lover, not seen for many years. She brings Thursday to this man's attention, and she subsequently wangles a visit to the detention centre where she facilitates the painting of the mural by the silent man. C cares about Thursday, whereas for the narrator, the situation is more abstract, and in the course of this chapter, there are what appear to be digressions into theories which are difficult to grasp, and even more difficult to contextualise in terms of the novel's intent. Or so it seems, until it all falls into place as the novel progresses.
Part III is the story of Isinglass, narrated by Thursday and by good luck I have stumbled on part of this chapter at Martin Edmond's blog. Even if you never read the novel, I recommend you read this excerpt because it captures so perfectly the dilemma that all refugees face when they must choose whether to leave or stay. This chapter traces the journey of Thursday's people and the cities they subsequently build, all of which fail because it is human nature to create conflict out of religious beliefs, or the pursuit of power and possessions, or good old Mother Nature creating the chaos that enables cruelty and divisiveness to fester.
Thursday tells his story because he is a Rememberer, and it is in his description of hearing voices from the past that the 'digressions' from Part 2 begin to make sense. At C's urging, the narrator in Part 2 had bought a copy of a work called Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness , by Julian Jaynes. At the time of reading I did not know that Julian Jaynes was a real person, and that his book (which you can still buy) was influential in the development of the idea of a divided self and a 'bicameral mind'. The theory is explained in Isinglass and confirmed as authentic by Wikipedia:
Bicameralism (the condition of being divided into "two-chambers") is a radical hypothesis in psychology that argues that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys — a bicameral mind. The term was coined by Julian Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3,000 years ago, near the end of the Mediterranean bronze age. (Wikipedia, lightly edited to remove links and footnotes, viewed 5/4/19)
Thursday's experience is an exemplar of this theory...
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/04/05/i...
March 24, 2020
A complex story, that is also very simple, that straddles reality and perhaps not- reality.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews