FOURTH CYCLE – Introduction
At this stage, it is only possible to speak of the general theme guiding the creation of the last four novels.
05.05.05: Dear Diary - this cycle of novels is intended to witness to the birth of the human Ego, a cosmic event that is happening now. However, I have seen far greater truths than this by other means, that leave me wondering if I will ever complete this cycle. I know what the next and the penultimate novels are about, but I have little or no inclination to write them out. There is also the fact that hardly anyone has read these novels. Only one person has read each of the last three, and she is not a practiced novel reader. The world changes and changes and all the time the themes and techniques of the novels become less and less relevant. PM
THE EAGLE FLIES ON FRIDAY – Introduction
Starting a new cycle is always difficult, like changing focus from something that has become familiar to something that is new and a bit strange. It is not that the theme of The Eagle flies on Friday was unknown – it's based on the Epic of Gilgamesh – but the tendency, as it were, of the novel was uncertain. I knew what the novel was to be about but didn't know if I could realise it.
As it turned out, the novel found its own way to its end, as they all have done. Is that all? Actually, yes. I sat down and wrote it. It took far longer than usual. Sometimes I had to wait a week to find out if a paragraph “worked”. It did; they all did.
Writing can be very strange, with gratitude due afterwards.
THE EAGLE FLIES ON FRIDAY – Summary
The Principal rules the City and so can do what he likes. He likes raping women and murdering their male kin should they complain. The City Council must find a way to curb the Principal and so save their City from impending chaos. The solution is to provide him with a friend, with the companionship he so desperately needs. They find a Wild Man, abandoned in the Desert as a child, as an appropriate friend. Because the Wild Man has lived with animals since he can remember, and the Principal has behaved like an animal for so long, they both need to be prepared in advance.
It's a curious relationship, with so little and so much in common. The Principal and the Friend come to spend most of the time wandering in the Desert like outcasts. It is the Wild Man's idea to climb the Stairway to Heaven, hidden away high in the Mountains to the East and guarded by a fearsome monster.
It's an unlikely task for the two of them, and it is likely to be their undoing
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ANGEL OF TRUTH – Introduction
A writer starting out often has to content with the problem of subjectivity. By this I mean the leaking of his or her own self-ness into what is intended to be reasonably objective fiction. For my part, I did not surmount this problem until I wrote REHEARSALS in the summer of 1975, just before burying myself in a university for eight years. Thus the first volume of the Richard Butler tetralogy, THE FOURTH MAN, is permeated by this subjectivity – for good or for ill. For what it's worth, I think it helps make the younger Richard that bit more credible.
Imagine my chagrin to discover that the fourteenth novel of the series, presented here, was also freighted with the dumb presence of subjectivity, after thirty years of relatively well controlled objectivity. It made writing ANGEL OF TRUTH extremely difficult. It is a shortish novel, a limited cast and situation, yet the step from one sentence to the next at times seemed impossible to achieve. One page took over two weeks to write, mainly because I could not frame one fairly straightforward sentence. I could not understand what was happening at that point in the novel.
It took me a good while to recognise what was actually happening overall in the novel. Until the last pages I believed – I'm not dissembling here – that ANGEL OF TRUTH was a mediocre work, in fact the worst I had written. It was only when I had finished it and could step back that I saw what had been achieved. The subjectivity I encountered in the novel was not my own, but that of Peter Lacey, the main character of the novel. I know that is a lot to say, but that is how I understand it. Peter Lacey lives in this novel. Read the novel and see him come to a birth.
ANGEL OF TRUTH – Summary
Peter Lacey has been obliged to abandon his life as peripatetic researcher into the more obscure areas of Utopianism. Now, he works as a temporary credit controller in various companies in London. One day, while en route to a routine business meeting, he and an associate from Sales pick up a hitch-hiker and give him a five minute lift to help him on his way.
Within a week, Peter's life is totally transformed.
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RESTORATION – Introduction
One of the problems with subjectivity in a novel is how it limits the author's voice. You are trapped in your character. This is not necessarily a bad thing nowadays. Over-educated authors – with the internet only a browser away – can easily overwhelm a narrative with an excess of character development and local colour.
However, what if your character is weird and wonderful? How far can you go in being true to this weirdness? I suppose it depends on the character. In RESTORATION the heroine has little or no memory (due to spending too much time in reality). She is also obsessive and extremely determined (characteristics of artificials). She is also charged with the mission of saving mankind (against its better judgement).
You cannot easily “live” with such a character; she is just too strange and – because of the lack of memory – too empty. Yet you are possessed by something – the atmosphere of the world she inhabits, the odd insight you get into her – which sustains you between writing sessions. I developed the habit of waking up at 5 AM each morning and spending two hours letting that day's work as it were grow in me. And yet what went down on the page was often a too simple, step-by-step narrative about a monomaniac woman and her derelict world, written in an semi-literate phonetic English. Sometimes I feared the onset of Alzheimer’s or the like and developed a second habit of carefully scrutinising that day's work as soon as possible, while the memory of what I intended to write was still with me.
Yet I got to know her so well. I was never sadder finishing a novel. I miss her company. But she has gone back into the oblivion of reality again, where she has become someone else for the duration.
RESTORATION – Summary
It is about a thousand years into the future. The world is a dried out husk, most of the water having been exchanged for omnium from the Other World. The human race is dying out because most women can no longer bear children and the alternatives don't work. Artificials are self-obsessed and clones die of loneliness. The few natural offspring that there are – called natals – rule the world as a time-serving bureaucratic clique. The rest of the human race subsists on what is known as Machine Maintenance, a superlatively efficient welfare system that oversees life from incubation bottle to render plant.
Into this hell on earth awakens the artificial woman who will be known to some as Sophie. She has just lost her fortune in the latest Bubble and so finds herself turfed out of reality into the tender metal care of the Machine. Her memory has been destroyed by her overlong sojourns in reality, and her only consolation perhaps are the strange dreams she has when she manages to sleep.
Even so, she is filled with an overwhelming desire to journey across the desolated land towards the high towers on the northern horizon. She doesn't know why she wants to go there, but she goes in any case – if only because she cannot do otherwise.
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REFLECTION – Introduction
This is the last novel of the cycle. You might expect the great climax – fireworks and what-not – but what you get is the first novel I was not able to write forty years ago. Very strange and for me very touching: to come so far in order to say what I would like to have been able to say when I was twenty!
The novel is in part a retelling of the tale of Oisín and his sojourn in the Land of Youth, which is then completed by means of a modern second part – in which the Fairy Princess of legend is enticed into our realm, the Land of the Wise.
> REFLECTION – Summary
After the failure of a love relationship, a young man travels to Kerry in order to throw himself into the ocean there. Complications prevent him from doing this, so that he finds himself instead carried off to another part of the country, to an ancient house that nestles close to the same ocean. In this house there is an equally ancient crystal mirror, and through this Looking Glass there is everything a young man might want. But of course there is also much more – that might take the young man a lifetime to understand…
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AFTERWORD
It might be that few will be prepared to read through the cycle with the intense concentration and openness of mind with which the novels were written. So, for those who agree with this sentiment, let me tell you a secret:
The primary beneficiary of a work of art is the artist himself – even when he or she has no idea that this is the case. A work of art is then more like a discarded husk than the object of aesthetic enjoyment. However, this husk retains the lineament of the artist’s endeavour – much as a husk in nature retains evidence of the form of the fruit that developed within it – so that it is possible for a peruser of the work to re-enact the artist’s labour and thus catch a glimpse – if only partially or fitfully – of the original inspiration that informed it. Now the value of such an experience lies not in the knowledge gained about the artist’s intentions or the like, but rather lies in the degree to which such insights help to stimulate that part of the reader that is analogous to the artist’s source of inspiration. This does not mean that he is necessarily made an artist, or that he should hunt out artistic experience just so as to feel again the thrill of stimulation. The artist’s source of inspiration is not an artistic source, it is a universal spring found in every human being. What the artistic stimulation can do is make people aware of this spring within themselves.
What happens then is down to the individual.
Philip Matthews
25 February 2011
Here is a small volume of essays that may help those who wish to enter more deeply into the experience of this universal spring. Note that most of these essays were composed between the third and fourth subcycles of Dark Liberation, that is between =OR= and THE EAGLE FLIES ON FRIDAY. Some experience of the earlier novels will therefore help in assimilating the content of the essays.
Dark Liberation: An Introduction Page 5