"The Bone Clocks"

[fiefoe]

The Atlantic reviewer called David Mitchell 'the most mult-talented writer', damning him with high praise, and James Wood says 'he has a lot to tell but not much to say' -- ouch. For me there are enjoyable parts but the whole thing didn't quite come together.

• My friends’ little brothers are all into Scalextric or BMX or Top Trumps—why do I get one who does this and says words like “navigate” and “diabolical”? Christ only knows how he’ll survive in Gravesend if he’s gay.
• Stella, cool as you please, covers herself with the sheet and tells Vinny, “Don’t be dense. This is precisely how it looks, Holly. We were going to let you know but, as you see, events have overtaken us all. Fact is, you’ve been dumped. Not pleasant, but it happens to the best of us, well, most of us, so c’est la vie. Don’t worry, there are plenty more Vinnys in the sea. So why not cut your losses now and just go?
• Then one day our school’s most gifted bully, Susan Hillage, got me as I walked home from school. Her dad was a squaddie in Belfast and, ’cause my mam’s Irish, she knelt on my head and wouldn’t let me go unless I admitted we kept our coal in the bathtub and that we loved the IRA.
• “Yeah,” I say. “It was. Tastes like grass.” <> “Green tea. Lucky you’re not fussy.” <> I ask, “Since when’s tea been green?”
• “Uncle Norm says, ‘Pity is a form of abuse.’ ”
• That’s the problem with boys: They tend to help you only ’cause they fancy you, but there’s no unembarrassing way to find out their real motives till it’s too late.
• “What if … what if heaven is real, but only in moments?... “S’pose heaven’s not like a painting that’s just hanging there forever, but more like … like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you’re alive, from passing cars, or … upstairs windows when you’re lost …”
• There’s a moon sharp enough to cut your finger on. <> We say nothing for a bit, but it’s not an awkward nothing.
• I s’pose if some man’s been inside you often enough, it’ll take a while to get rid of him. Love’s pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.
• Using the brother as bait was clever, but look what you’re reduced to now, Horologist. Trying to hide in this slut-gashed bone clock. Xi Lo would shudder! Holokai would puke! If, of course, they were alive,
• He sees I don’t understand. “Hobbies are for pleasure, but rituals keep you going. My son died, you see. I take the photos for him.”
• For girls—me, anyway—sex is what you do on page one to get to the love that’s later on in the book.
• They’ll be computer programmers or teachers or solicitors, and it shows. It’s in how they speak. They use precise words, like they own them, like Jacko does, in fact, but not like any kid in my year at school’d dare to. Ed Brubeck’ll be one of them in two years.
• Gwyn ignores this, like a goalie ignoring a shot going a mile wide.
• I think about pinball, and how being a kid’s like being shot up the firing lane and there’s no veering left or right; you’re just sort of propelled. But once you clear the top, like when you’re sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, suddenly there’s a thousand different paths you can take, some amazing, others not. Tiny little differences in angles and speed’ll totally alter what happens to you later,

• For me, Britten’s a hit-and-miss composer; prolix on occasion but, when pumped and primed, the old queen binds your quivering soul to the mast and lashes it with fiery sublimity …
• “Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul.
• I could bloody murder a fag, as I delight in telling Americans.” <> “You don’t need to light up in here.” Olly Quinn is our pet nonsmoker. “Just breathe in.”
• “There’s this operation, little brother. It would help that one-track mind of yours. Vets do it cheaply.”
• ‘By all that’s wonderful it is the sea, I believe, the sea itself—or is it youth alone? Who can tell? But you here—you all had something out of life: money, love—whatever one gets on shore—and, tell me, wasn’t that the best time, that time we were young at sea; young and had nothing, on the sea that gives nothing, except hard knocks—and sometimes a chance to feel your strength—that only—what you all regret?’ (Conrad's 'Youth')
• Sex may be the antidote to death but it offers life everlasting only to the species, not the individual.
• Coupling is frenzy; decoupling is farce. Mariângela squirms around to face me and I wonder why women are uglier once they’re unpeeled, encrusted, and had.
• “You’re a friend, Mariângela. Today you’re an intimate friend. But do I want to introduce you to my parents? No. Move in with you? No. Plan a future, fold laundry with you, get a cat? No.”
• “Men have imagined republics and principalities that never really existed at all. Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what ‘is’ for what ‘should be’ pursues his downfall rather than his preservation; for a man who strives after goodness in all his acts is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good.” For this plainspoken pragmatism, Cardinal Pole denounced Niccolò Machiavelli as the devil’s apostle.
• Everyone said I’d handled myself manfully at his funeral, but if they could have read my mind, they would have called me a sociopath. <> Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.
• “I understand that you need armor, working in a bar where Europe’s Chetwynd-Pitts come to play. But jadedness runs through you, Holly, like a second nervous system.”
• I consider how you don’t get to choose whom you’re attracted to, you only get to wonder about it, retrospectively. Racial differences I’ve always found to have an aphrodisiac effect on me, but class difference is sexuality’s Berlin Wall. Certainly, I can’t read Holly Sykes as well as I can girls from my own incometax tribe, but you never know.
• Start out in life as a social nobody, like you and Olly—no offense—and the only direction you can go is up. Start off with your name in the Domesday Book, like me and Jonny, and the only direction is down the sodding crapper. It’s like an intergenerational pass-the-parcel with bankruptcy instead of a tube of Rolos, and whoever’s alive when the money dries up gets to be the Chetwynd-Pitt who has to learn how to assemble flat-pack furniture from Argos.”
• Crying—in public! The unedifying sight sobers me a tad with regard to Holly. Remember: What Cupid gives, Cupid takes away.
• So what if Marcus Anyder builds his own empire of stocks, properties, portfolios? Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark. See how the light needs shadows. Look: Wrinkles spread like mildew over our peachy sheen; beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat, varicose veins worm through plucked calves; torsos and breasts fatten and sag; behold Brigadier Philby, French kissing with Mrs. Bolitho; as last year’s song hurtles into next year’s song and the year after that, and the dancers’ hairstyles frost, wither, and fall in irradiated tufts; cancer spatters inside this tarry lung, in that aging pancreas, in this aching bollock; DNA frays like wool, and down we tumble; a fall on the stairs, a heart attack, a stroke; not dancing but twitching. This is Club Walpurgis. They knew it in the Middle Ages. Life is a terminal illness.
• while the wealthy are no more likely to be born stupid than the poor, a wealthy upbringing compounds stupidity while a hardscrabble childhood dilutes it, if only for Darwinian reasons. This is why the elite need a prophylactic barrier of shitty state schools
• You’ve told me a lot today, Holly, and I’m honored, even if you think I’m betraying your trust by talking to you like this. But I haven’t heard one thing that forfeits your right to a useful and, yeah, even a content life.”
• if I did I’d tell Fitzsimmons et al. that love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death. Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you to Holly, who breathes like the sea. This time I whisper it, at about the violin’s volume: “I love you.” No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.
• I kiss her on the mouth and blood’s rushing everywhere. <> She murmurs, “You only value something if you know it’ll end.”
• I’m out, treading in Holly’s ten-minutes-old footsteps through knee-deep snow in the courtyard, where the morning cold is a plunging cold; but the blue sky’s blue as Earth from space, and the warmth from the sun’s a lover’s breath; and icicles drip drops of bright in steep-sloped streets from storybooks whose passersby have mountain souls;
• Then I’ll have to confess either to stealing an Alzheimer victim’s valuable stamp collection, or luring a fellow student at Humber so deeply into debt that he drove himself off a cliff.
• You need a leap of faith to leave your old life behind. True metamorphosis doesn’t come with flowcharts.”
• So. This is a real, live Faustian pact I’m being offered. <> I almost smile. Faust tends not to have happy endings. <> But a happy ending like whose? Like Brigadier Philby’s? <> He passed away peacefully, surrounded by family. <> If that’s a happy ending, they’re fucking welcome to it. <> When push comes to shove, what’s Faust without his pact?
• “We are the Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Monastery of Sidelhorn Pass. It’s quite a mouthful, you’ll agree, so we refer to ourselves as the Anchorites.”

• But I know that, after a couple of months, a well-ordered life tastes like a flat, nonalcoholic lager. Which isn’t the same as saying I’m addicted to war zones, as Brendan helpfully implied earlier. That’s as ridiculous as accusing David Beckham of being addicted to playing soccer.
• But as the insurgency heated up the pink ink crept up the roads north to Tikrit and Mosul, where an American TV crew got shot to shit. Ditto the road to the airport. When Sadr City, the eastern third of Baghdad, got blocked off, the map became about three-quarters pink. Big Mac says I’m re-creating an old map of the British Empire.
• Grandpa Dave says when he was small his daddy used to hang apples on very tall poles over his allotment, so all the Pegasuses’d hover there, eat, and poo. Pegasus poo is so magic the pumpkins’d grow really really big, bigger than me, even, so just one would feed a family for a week.”
• I did a piece about compensation for Spyglass: Blood money payments had fallen from $2,500 to $500 per life—less than a visit to an ATM for many Westerners
• Edict number one ruled that any member of the Ba’ath Party above a certain rank was to be sacked. With one stroke of the pen Bremer consigned to the scrap-heap the very civil servants, scientists, teachers, police officers, engineers, and doctors that the coalition needed to rebuild the country. Fifty thousand white-collar Iraqis lost their salaries, pensions, and futures and wanted the occupation to fail from that day on. Edict number two disbanded the Iraqi Army. No back pay, no pension, no nothing. Bremer created 375,000 potential insurgents—unemployed, armed, and trained to kill. Hindsight is easy, sure, but if you’re the viceroy of an occupied country, it’s your job to possess foresight
• Octogenarian faces are hard to read; the skin’s so crinkled and the eyes so birdlike that facial clues are obscured.
• I think, My daughters will have careers, like my wife had career once, their future good now. Saddam statue pulled down by Iraqi and Americans—but by night looting begin from museum. U.S. soldiers, they just watch. General Garner said, ‘Is natural, after Saddam.’ I think, My God, America has no plan. I think, Here come Dark Ages. Is true. My daughters’ school hit by missile, in war. Money for new school was stolen. So no school, for months and months now. My daughters not go out. Is too danger. All day they argue, read, draw, dream, wash if there is water, watch neighbor TV if there is power.
• “The greats? Well, they all share that quality Napoleon most admired in his generals: luck. Be in Kabul when it falls. Be in Manhattan on 9/11. Be in Paris the night Diana’s driver makes his fatal misjudgement.”
• A little black-haired girl in a zebra T-shirt and green leggings slips inside the propped-open doors. Christ, that’s her, it’s got to be, and a hand grenade of hope goes off in my guts and I shout, “AOIFE!”
• Then I just sat there, listening to the bursts of gunfire, the drone of engines and generators, shouts, barks, brakes, music, and more gunfire: a Baghdad symphony. The stars were feeble for a browned-out city and the moon looked like it had liver disease.

• “So why is Echo Must Die such a decomposing hog? One: Hershey is so bent on avoiding cliché that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistleblower. Two: The fantasy subplot clashes so violently with the book’s State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look. Three: What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?”
• And as for Richard Cheeseman’s rather lackluster review—” <> “What christening is complete without a jealous fairy’s curse?”
• “Three cheers for the Woodstock of the Mind.” I assess the Sykes woman:
• “I don’t look at unsolicited manuscripts.” <> “Humanity asks you to make an exception.” <> “Please don’t think me rude, Miss Moore, but I’d rather perform root-canal surgery on myself, or wake up next to Aphra Booth in the breeding pen of an alien menagerie,
• Now the Foreign Office has gone all meritocratic our diplomats have lost their larger-than-life Graham Greeneness, and are of less novelistic use.
• another woman materializes by the tree fern’s trunk like a Star Trek character. She’s dark, golden, mid-to-late thirties, and impalingly attractive.
• “Nick has a lovely soul,” says a Newfoundland poetess, whose name I’ve already forgotten but who has the eyes of a seal gazing out of a Greenpeace poster.
• My grief is ennobling, but crushing, and I withdraw from life. I’m glimpsed occasionally riding the obscurer London Tube lines, out in zones four and five. Spring adds, summer multiplies, autumn subtracts, winter divides.
• A minnow of déjà vu darts by and its name is Geoffrey Chaucer: <> “Now, Sirs,” quoth he, “if it be you so lief / To finde Death, turn up this crooked way,
• She sniffs. “For the Noongar, the land couldn’t be owned. No more than the seasons could be owned, or a year. What the land gave, you shared.” <> Holly Sykes’s voice is flattening out and faltering, as if she’s not speaking but translating a knotty text. Or picking one voice out from a roaring crowd.
• “It’s so embarrassing,” he said modestly. “I mean, what would Steinbeck have made of this?” I managed to smile, thinking how Modesty is Vanity’s craftier stepbrother.
• THE SHANGHAI BUND is several things: a waterfront sweep of 1930s architecture with some ornate Toytown set pieces along the way; a symbol of Western colonial arrogance; a symbol of the ascension of the modern Chinese state; four lanes of slow-moving, or no-moving, traffic; and a raised promenade along the Huangpu River where flows a Walt Whitman throng of tourists, families, couples, vendors, pickpockets, friendless novelists, muttering drug dealers, and pimps: {??}
• Shanghai by night is a mind of a million lights: of orange dot-to-dots along expressways, of pixel-white headlights and red taillights; green lights on the cranes; blinking blues on airplanes; office blocks across the road, and smearages of specks, miles away, every microspeck a life, a family, a loner, a soap opera;
• Had Dad explained that his wife, who had sacrificed her own acting career for the family, was to play the role? No. He had said, “Raquel, it’s all yours.” The doorbell rang and it was Mum’s brother, my uncle Bob, come to pick her up. Mum said I’d learn betrayals came in various shapes and sizes, but to betray someone’s dream is the unforgivable one. A bird hopped onto the foaming lilac outside. Its throat quivered; notes rose and fell out. As long as it kept singing and I kept staring, I told myself, I wouldn’t start crying. <> “It’s a wren,” said Mum, turning to go.
• I look up. Hugo Lamb’s face is that of a boy dismembering a daddy longlegs; mild interest and gleeful malevolence.
• For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste, and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucketloads of crap. Our analog ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it out mechanically. Rewrites cost them months, meters of ink ribbon, and pints of Tippex. Poor sods.
• My soul still aches from being dumped, but I’m handling it. I don’t want to have to unhandle it, or un-unhandle it. We ingest our emotions, and grief for a lost relationship is not what I want to ingest. Carmen’s “yr friend” is code for “We won’t be getting back together” and “hello” instead of “hi” is the textual equivalent of a chilly air-kiss rather than a cheek-to-cheek contact kiss:
• to a certain type of southerner, Iceland exerts a gravitational force far in excess of its landmass and cultural import. Pytheas, the Greek cartographer who lived around 300 B.C. in a sunbaked land on the far side of the ancient world, he felt this gravity, and put you on his map: Ultima Thule. .. Sir Joseph Banks, enough Victorian scholars to sink a longship, Jules Verne, even Hermann Göring’s brother, who was spotted by Auden and MacNeice here in 1937, they all felt the pull of the north, of your north, and all of them, I believe, like Auden—were never not thinking about Iceland.
• we also write within an imaginative space. Amid boxes, crates, shelves, and cabinets full of … junk, treasure, both cultural—nursery rhymes, mythologies, histories, what Tolkien called ‘the compost heap’; and also personal stuff—childhood TV, homegrown cosmologies, stories we hear first from our parents, or later from our children—and, crucially, maps. Mental maps. Maps with edges. And for Auden, for so many of us, it’s the edges of the maps that fascinate …
• “That’s the trouble. All that beauty: in-sodding-sufferable. Ewan Rice calls Venice the Capital of Divorce—and set one of his best books there. About divorce. Venice is humanity at its ripped-off, ripping-off worst
• “The one in the carwash. Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well.” Pens scratch. “Oh, and beware of the verb ‘seem’; it’s a textual mumble. And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below.
• A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life.
• Holly, my only friend, really. I’m sorry about the upset my death will cause her. My favorite line from Roth’s The Human Stain: “Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.”

• And that by presending my keys and signs, I could locate and liberate her reraveled soul from its asylum, after forty-one years. This is so slim a hope as to be anorexic. Sentience dissipates after only a few hours in another’s parallax of memories. After so many years of incorporeality, would Esther’s soul even know its name?
• Her foamy hair is dyed auburn but the gray is showing through, and her turquoise-framed glasses only heighten her sickly pallor. An unkind describer might refer to her face as like a party nobody’s turned up to.
• A dragonfly arrives and leaves like a change of mind. Holly’s walking off.
• Some called her a traitor, she told me, but by the 1870s her logic was demonstrable. The Europeans were too many, their appetites too voracious, their morality too fickle, and their rifles too accurate. The Noongar’s slim hope of survival lay in adaptation, and if this altered what it meant to be Noongar, what choice was there? Without knowledge of the Ship People’s minds, however, even this slim hope was doomed, and so Moombaki had chosen a ten-year-old half-caste girl for her present sojourn.
• That’s that cleared up. My one-night fling is now … let’s say it, ‘immortal.’ ” <> “Immortal with terms and conditions,” I equivocate.
• “From then on,” Arkady unthreads and rethreads his ponytail, “we’re stuck on repeat. Our second body grew, matured, died; bam, we’re back in the Dusk; then, whoosh, forty-nine days later, we’re waking up back on earth—in a body of the opposite gender, just to well and truly screw your head up.”
• In 1198 Pope Innocent III proposed a landgrab that became known as the Albigensian Crusade. The King of France was otherwise engaged, but he gave barons from the north of France his blessing to ride south, kill Cathars, confiscate their lands, and subdue a disloyal region for the French Crown. Heresy is fissiparous, however. What was smashed, splintered.
• Arkady says, “The Anchorites fuel their atemporality by feeding on souls, as Marinus said. But not just any old soul will do; only the souls of the Engifted can be decanted. Like organ donation, where only one in a thousand is a compatible match.
• To write a memoir in which psychic events irrupt occasionally is one thing, but for psychic events to dreamseed you, serve you Irish tea, and spin you a whole cosmology, that’s another. Maybe Ōshima’s right; maybe I should suasion her back to 119A. A metalife of 1,400 years is no guarantee that you always know the right thing to do.
• just as Holly’s life was scarred by Xi Lo–in–Jacko’s death on the First Mission. If you love and are loved, whatever you do affects others.
• Dmitry said he shuddered to think what Uncle Pyotr had paid for such a plum post. The answer was a consignment of Sienna marble to a pet monastery of the patriarch’s but, again, we didn’t hear this from Pyotr Ivanovich’s lips. Human cruelty can be infinite. Human generosity can be boundless.
• The pair looked unsettled by my ignorance. Claudette Holokai said, “Returnees die, go to the Dusk, are resurrected forty-nine days later. Sojourners, like Xi Lo here, just move on to a new body when the old one’s worn out.”
• Xi Lo nodded at an accelerating pace, before declaring in Russian, “God’s blood! Marinus—the doctor, on Dejima. Big man, red face, white hair, Dutch, an irascible know-it-all. You were there when HMS Phoebus blasted the place to matchwood.”
  I experienced a feeling akin to vertigo. “You were there?”
  “I watched it happen. From the magistrate’s pavilion.”
  “But—who were you? Or who were you ‘in’?”
• “A winding tale,” said Xi Lo, “involving a colleague, Ōshima, who was Japanese in his first life, and a nefarious abbot named Enomoto, who unearthed a pre-Shinto psychodecanter up in Kirishima.”
• “My body was. My soul was in Jacko’s skull, as Jacko lay in his bed in the Captain Marlow. Esther Little’s soul was there too, as was the soul of Holokai, another colleague. With Xi Lo’s soul, that made four Greeks hiding in the belly of the Trojan Horse. Miss Constantin appeared in the room, through the Aperture, and ushered Jacko up the Way of Stones into the Chapel of the Dusk.”
• Back through the night, spent in a church, with a teenage Ed Brubeck. The Script loves foreshadow.
• Esther fished alone. “Angling’s like prayer,” she said. “Even together, you’re alone.”
• Could she truly have seen so far ahead, so long ago? One by one I subintone the syllables. Hesitantly at first, afraid to make an error and invalidate the sequence, but the pace picks up until the name is the player and I the instrument.
• “The Chapel was built by faith,” replies Esther. “But faith requires doubt, like matter requires antimatter. That crack, that’s the Blind Cathar’s doubt. It dates from before he became what he later became. Doubt that he was doing God’s work. Doubt that he had the right to take the souls of others so that he could cheat death.”
• There are days when New York strikes me as a conjuring trick. All great cities do and must revert to jungle, tundra, or tidal flats, if you wait long enough, and I should know. I’ve seen it with my eyes. Today, however, New York’s here-ness is incontestable, as if time is subject to it, not it subject to time. What immortal hand or eye could frame these charted miles, welded girders, inhabited sidewalks, and more bricks than there are stars? ... Yet all this was already there, packed into that magpie entrepôt like an oak tree packed into an acorn or the Chrysler Building folded up small enough to fit inside the brain of William Van Alen.
• “The Cathar alphabet,” I tell her. “No one can read it now, not even heresiologists. The alphabet is descended from Oc, a language older even than Basque.”
• Hugo looks back at his long-ago lover. “They”—he looks about the Chapel—“cured me. They cured me of a terrible wasting disease called mortality. There’s a lot of it about. The young hold out for a time, but eventually even the hardiest patient gets reduced to a desiccated embryo, a Strudlebug … a veined, scrawny, dribbling … bone clock, whose face betrays how very, very little time they have left.”
• “You have the potential to whinge people to death, Sadaqat.” When Constantin’s tone turns maternal I know time’s running out.
• “Well, as I was packing, Jacko appeared, with a—a—a labyrinth. He used to draw these big, intricate mazes, just for fun, like. There should be another one opening soon …” After another ten paces of curving darkness, Holly finds a gap on the right and goes through it. For fear of putting her off, I say nothing about the maze Xi Lo once designed for King William of Orange.
• Transubstantiation. The Blind Cathar’s soul became the Chapel of the Dusk. Xi Lo’s soul, I believe, entered the fabric of the Chapel during the First Mission. Once it was inside, Xi Lo became this labyrinth. Like a benign cancer, perhaps?

• The RTÉ station is the mouthpiece of Stability and broadcasts officially approved news on the hour with factual how-to programs in between about growing food, repairing objects, and getting by in our ever-more-makeshift country.
• At first, I wasn’t sure if I could, I dunno, write up the minutes for the Kilcrannog Tidy Towns Committee, knowing that, as we sat there discussing grants for the new playground, souls were migrating across an expanse of Dusk into a blankness called the Last Sea—but I found I could.
• I pull my blanket over me, like Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, who I feel like, in fact, in a world of too many wolves and not enough woodcutters. It’s chilly out. Tomorrow I’ll ask Martin the Mayor if we’re likely to see a delivery of coal this winter, though I know he’ll just say, “If we see any, Holly, the answer’s yes.” Fatalism’s a weak antidepressant, but there’s nothing stronger at Dr. Kumar’s.
• Don’t touch fox’s tails, Declan says. A fox’s brush is a bacteriological weapon, barbed with disease. Probably got fleas, too
• The POC protects its Lease Lands by paying for the Stability Militia to man the sixty-mile Cordon, which is why the ten-mile coastal strip from Bantry to Cork has been spared the worst of the lawlessness that plagues much of Europe as the Endarkenment switches off power networks and emaciates civic society.
• My stomach makes a buried squeal. Once upon a time “my body” meant “me,” pretty much, but now “me” is my mind and my body is a selection box of ailments and aches.
• Civilization’s like the economy, or Tinkerbell: If people stop believing it’s real, it dies.
• Marinus assured him the salmon fishing in Iceland is world-class. Rafiq’s key to Dooneen Cottage is still around his neck, by accident or design I don’t know, but it’s his. He picked up two white pebbles from the strip of beach by the pier, I noticed, and put them in his saggy coat pocket. Then the three of us hug, and if I could choose one moment of my life to sit inside of for the rest of eternity, like Esther Little did for all those decades, it’d be now, no question. Aoife’s in here too, inside Lorelei, as is Ed, as is Zimbra, with his cold nose and excited whine.