He heard air-raid sirens wailing in the cities – those human fiends made a worse racket than the devil himself – but now they would get a taste of some real doomsday music.
Well, that was just fucking strange.
It’s hard to describe without blowing the experience for someone else. It’s about myths and legends, about mythologising, about fairytales and bedtime stories. The structure is a take on the Golem story, beginning during the Second World War, as an apparent alchemist is smuggled across Europe towards Iceland, carrying the raw clay of the thing that will change the world. And what a world. Time is murdered. Ghosts hang out on street corners and show you their death wounds.
the man in the bed gave the impression of being a half-mad skeleton who’d wrapped himself in skin for the sake of appearances
It’s a funny book, I have to say. Which is a useful anchor in what is otherwise a mad kaleidoscope of a thing, a spin of lies and grief and insanity and the supernatural. The third section massively reframes the first two parts and you find out what the book is really (mostly, kind of) about, and it’s both desperately sad and wonderfully soaring.
It is, as much as anything, a performance – Sjon showing what he can do when he tosses the rulebook and mixes styles and text formats and literary antecedents in an attempt to gather up Story (or perhaps fairy story) as a whole, and in fact to gather his own life as a whole, reaching across sixty years (or millennia) to snatch up every last scrap and stuff it in.
I thought it was amazing, and it held me to the end.
(One caveat: a quarter of the way in, there’s a short rape scene that threw me out of the book for a few days.)
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