Heroes Not Zombies

Just read Carlos Luis Zafon’s “The Angel’s Game” [ISBN 978-0753826447]. I quite enjoyed “The Shadow of the Wind” but I actually enjoyed this more. Maybe I’ll go back and re-read “The Shadow of the Wind” now. Both books are set in Barcelona (which I’ve never visited but is definitely on my wish list….) and both have a strong flavour of mystery about them.

At times I found “The Angel’s Game” a bit confusing, but it’s that slipping into magical realism, and interweaving of imaginary and “real” even within the context of fiction that brings both the confusion and the dream-like quality. There’s plenty of evidence that this is exactly what the book’s “about”…

All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction.

and

Everything is a tale, Martin. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content. We only accept as true what can be narrated.

That first quote is provocative of course, but it does remind us that all of our experience of “reality” is a creative act. Michael Frayn’s “The Human Touch” describes this beautifully. How do we experience reality without our subjectivity? We don’t. Our senses, our imagination and our memory and perpetually active in creating what we observe, what we know.

The second quote reminds me of Richard Kearney’s “On Stories“. This point often pops into my mind when I encounter someone who thinks rationalism is about “data” or “facts” and fails to acknowledge the narrative they tell to convey their interpretation of reality.

One more…..

It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we’re awake.

Hear T S Eliot there? “Human kind cannot bear very much reality”

To sum up, I like a book which makes me think. I like one which is well written and really stimulates my imagination so that I “see” the places and events. And I also enjoy a page turner. “The Angel’s Game” hits all three buttons for me!

The Selected Works of T S Spivet is quite unique (ISBN 978-1-846-55277-9). It’s a novel by Reif Larsen and tells the story of 12 year old T S Spivet who maps everything he comes across. He draws the most illuminating, enlightening and thought provoking diagrams and maps and the novel is liberally illustrated with them down the margins of virtually every page. I can’t remember the last time I was so delighted by a book. Utterly engaging, charming, thought provoking, funny, and, in places, intensely moving.

The novel uses the device of the innocence of the child observer to great effect. You begin to look at the world anew after reading a book like this. The ordinary seems less ordinary. The world seems more full of wonder.

Here’s two or three short passages to illustrate something of the novel. As T S looks out over the landscape he spots a bird –

A red-tailed hawk swooped down into the rippling rapids of the river. It was gone for a full two seconds, completely submerged in the cold mountain water. I wondered how it felt beneath the surface, a creature trained for the air but now surrounded by liquid. Did he feel like a clumsy visitor as I did when I was underwater, staring at the minnows that lurked like flecks of light on our pond’s bottom? And then the hawk was already tearing back up into the air, droplets exploding off its pumping wings. There was a tiny silver fish in its beak. A perfect slip of a thing. The bird circled once and I strained to watch it move against the cliffs of the canyon, but it was already gone.

What I love about this observation is not just the detail which conjures up such a vivid image in your mind, but this kind of observation is special. It’s empathic observation. T S doesn’t just see, he uses his imagination and his memory to connect with the bird far more deeply than a simple description would do.

As the Montana born and bred T S reaches Chicago he is amazed by the cityscape. The passage is far too long to quote here but within the description is this –

As I watched I fell under the city’s spell of multiplicity and transience.

Wow! The “city’s spell of multiplicity and transience”! Goodness, that hits the nail on the head!

Finally, here’s what one of the characters says about maps –

A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.

Absolutely. T S believes we all have a complete map of the world engraved into our brains when we are born and we spend our lives creating maps of what we see and experience and trying to figure out how to access that map.

Read this. It’s lovely. Really, it’s a sheer delight. It’s also unique. You’ll never have read a book quite like this one.

Reif Larson has an accompanying website – http://www.tsspivet.com/