Dark Liberation: An Introduction by Philip Matthews
THE LAND OF FIRE – Introduction
Eight years separated the completion of THE WHITE CITY, the first volume of NOTHING DARKER THAN THE LIGHT, and the second volume, THE LAND OF FIRE. That time was spent studying at a university. Would a trilogy of phantasy novels require that amount of preparation? What if behind the romancing and heroics there appeared some sombre questions? For instance, what is divinity that human beings can either believe or not believe in it? Again, if God is dead, might some human beings not feel the need to replace him in some tangible way?
Anyway, after the BA and the PhD came THE LAND OF FIRE and, in a matter of weeks, the final volume, THE FIELD OF PEACE. Just like that? Just like that. Two years per volume had been planned. All written in a wonderful steady flow in a couple of months. That's how it works, believe me.
THE LAND OF FIRE – Summary
As part of a global strategy to outflank its rival, The Empire has established an outpost to the north of the White City. A small expedition is mounted to investigate the coastline further up the coast and map the northern heavens to aid future navigation. It happens that the Priest-Astronomer charged with the latter task was also instrumental in releasing the prophesy of doom that the Brigan priest, Kandrigi, had tried to keep to himself. It also happens that the Brigan captive who would serve as a guide to the northern lands is the one rumours say was succoured and entertained by the virgin goddess, Agnanna, and who would serve some divine purpose during the coming Last Days.
What should be a routine patrol becomes a world in microcosm suffering extreme stress as all the traditional values and beliefs are undermined by mounting panic and replaced by drastic reactions that threaten to destroy the two ships and their crews.
(back)
THE FIELD OF PEACE – Introduction
As said, THE FIELD OF PEACE came hot on the heels of THE LAND OF FIRE in late 1983. My fear then was that I might fail to do justice to the new scenario that opens in THE FIELD OF PEACE and the transition to a more global perspective. With the exception of some weakness in chapter two, I should not have worried. The central characters continued to lead their own existences, to work out their very individual destinies, as they head towards the final destruction.
I didn't understand the ending for years, thinking that Pol-Chi had failed – and that my artistic vision had been at fault (I had been at fault). But if you consider the following novel, THE BLUE RECORD, as a kind of commentary on NOTHING DARKER THAN THE LIGHT, then you see that dying might be a whole lot more difficult than many believe.
THE FIELD OF PEACE – Summary
The Miracle of the North had different effects on different people. It spurred the aristocratic Priest-Astronomer, Hepteidon, to conceive a world plan to save mankind. All he needed to do first was to take over the Empire, then perhaps create a miracle of his own. Complications, of course, a slave who seems to will his own death just to make a point, an Imperial concubine who might be demanding the impossible of him, and a wily Emperor with an agenda of his own.
Hepteidon will need his old companions from the Miracle days to help sort out the mess. Trouble is, the kind of help they bring is not quite what he is hoping for...
(back)
THE BLUE RECORD – Introduction
To compose a novel about characters existing on the verge of consciousness only required an enormous amount of consciousness on my part. Everything in their world as it effects them had to be accounted for, both the subtle side events and the endlessly repetitive detail of their machine environment.
Does it work? It will put you to sleep, almost. The repetition will come to bore you, almost. Then the pathos will seep in as characters try to attract the attention of the sun, try to understand themselves in terms of the machines that surround them, try to communicate with each other.
Does it work? It does.
Welcome to human immortality.
THE BLUE RECORD – Summary
The time has come when man reaches the peaks of achievement promised by science. All the functions on Earth are now controlled by the World Machine, which is programmed to maintain the World Pattern indefinitely. Thus mankind has at last achieved immortality, kept alive for ever by the World Machine.
This system has survived now for many thousands of years. Perhaps in order in maintain a residual meaningfulness for human life in the World Pattern, slots are provided in the various tasks undertaken by the World Machine for human involvement, when individuals are revived in order to go through a series of routines from time to time.
One such routine is the periodic war between the North and the South. Gorj is the Leader of the South and he has performed this ritual on many occasions over the millennia. But now there has been a slight accident with a Northern craft and Gorj is instructed to help the pilot of the craft who has been injured. It is the first direct contact between human beings since they became immortal.
The outcome is devastating. Gorj’s behaviour become more and more erratic. Symer, the World Agent, whose task it is to maintain order among the human Immortals, in turn becomes disturbed as he tries to counteract the shocking effects Gorj has on other Immortals. In time Symer’s conditioning breaks down completely, which permits the awakening of the one power that mankind cannot completely control, memory – and its truths. (back)
THE KINGSWOOD BLACK BOOKS – Introduction
THE KINGSWOOD BLACK BOOKS form the second sub-cycle and comprise the four novels, THE FOURTH MAN, LUPITA, CROW STATION and SOLOMON'S DREAM, that provide an account of the life of Richard Butler. The origins of the tetralogy lie in an initial unconscious impulse in the 1960s which only came to full conscious in the early 1980s, after the trilogy, NOTHING DARKER THAN THE LIGHT, had been completed.
In a very real sense, perhaps owing to the way in which the first elements of the tetralogy – which now form much of THE FOURTH MAN – came into being, the biography of Richard Butler is an unavoidably provisional affair. Little of it has been revised – and that only for reasons of clarity of sense – and even less has been rewritten. Each novel had in a way only one chance of being written and we get only what could be captured on the first attempt.
There is no standard against which Richard Butler can be measured. He exists in a void, and his whole world therefore exists in a void. That is the nature of freedom.
The interesting question for me now is this: does the reader get more than one chance to read the tetralogy?
THE FOURTH MAN – Introduction
This in a way is the first novel. It was not conceived as such but it was composed in most of its parts before THE WHITE CITY, the first novel to be written as such. THE FOURTH MAN has roots in stories begun in the sixties and composed from then until the early eighties. A mixture of overweening ambition and fundamental spiritual timidity would have prevented the realisation of the work before the NOTHING DARKER THAN THE LIGHT trilogy had been completed.
However, once the novel had been compiled, its four by four structure was seen to provide the underlying structure for the whole cycle of novels.
THE FOURTH MAN itself is the first novel of the Richard Butler tetralogy, THE KINGSWOOD BLACK BOOKS.
THE FOURTH MAN – Summary
The novel is about the sentimental education of an Irish man, Richard Butler. Given the limited possibilities of the biographical novel, the experiences of Butler are conveyed by means of sixteen episodes that concentrate on the key incidents in his life between childhood and his mid-thirties. These sixteen episodes are arranged in four sections of four episodes each. The sections are not titled but they concern, in turn, the family, the group, the social, and the individual, the final section indicating the meaning of the title of the work: the moral imperative that we achieve (what can best be called for now) individuality.
THE FOURTH MAN is an attempt to describe on one hand the fragmentary nature of modern life, the experience of disconnection and decentred-ness, yet on the other hand, the intense aura of significance t
hat accompanies certain key experiences in this alienated life, and how by reflection on these intense moments some sense can be made of our lives by tracing the implicit connections between these moments.
A variety of narrative techniques has been used to achieve this end, ranging from first and third person narration, variable focus on Butler, rhetorical devices like figuration, reinforcement and connotation, and a variety of settings in Ireland, England and Europe. It is hoped that THE FOURTH MAN succeeds in conveying the early life of Richard Butler in a convincing way, and that it also provides for the reader an example of how we ought to interpret the moments of illumination that occur in all our lives.
(back)
LUPITA – Introduction
LUPITA is the second novel of the Richard Butler tetralogy, THE KINGSWOOD BLACK BOOKS. It came to be written in 1987 at the end of a long period of intensive creative activity, so that it both marks the culmination of a significant life-process and the limit of my understanding at that time. SOLOMON’S DREAM, the final volume of the series, written four years later, shows by comparison how my understanding grew in the intervening fallow period.
LUPITA required a great deal of preparation, yet the central motifs of the reed boat and the sea journey only appeared once the work itself was under way. Such is the wisdom of the creative power. But it remains an intimate and affectionate novel, firmly rooted in the ordinary no matter where the creative urge takes us.
LUPITA – Summary
Jane Blake, 37, suddenly leaves her mother, with whom she has lived since the death in a car crash of her fiancé thirteen years previously, to try to make a life of her own before it is too late. This action sparks a profound crisis, and she finds that, living alone for the first time, as well as trying to decide what to do with her new freedom, she must re-examine her life in order to make sense of this freedom, that is, discover who she really is.
This situation is complicated by the competing claims and demands of her family. Her mother, embittered by a life of restriction, might be glad to see the last of a clinging child or might suffer abandonment by the only person who actually cared for her. Her father, long separated from the family and living in England, might want to help his favourite daughter without interference from his wife or he might want a housekeeper in old age. Her mother’s lover, Jack, might also want to help his favourite in the family, though this rush of attention could be misunderstood, or else he wants rid of her in order to have her mother to himself. Her sister, Helen, with great ambition for her banker husband, might resent the shifting of the burden of caring for their mother on to her, but complications in her own marriage might just as well tempt her to slip into a relation of dependence, now that her mother has more time for her. These familial pressures heighten old resentments and fears and threaten to draw Jane back into a sterile passivity masked as a capacity to endure suffering, but they also draw out the vulnerable love and sympathy that arise from relations of blood and the long-shared fortunes of family life, feelings that give her an autonomous strength and an integrity that surprises her.
But the most threatening aspect of the crisis is brought to the fore by the attentions of a young man, Michael, who strives to protect himself from the ghost of his dead mother by becoming a philosopher, guarding empty factories at night as a means to developing an ‘open mind’. Jane avoids these attentions at first, but as circumstances draw them together she is obliged to relive her previous disastrous relations with men. Richard, who said he loved her and whom she abandoned alone in a foreign city, and Terry, who was wealthy enough to marry yet whom she drove to despair and death. She comes to realise she has a destructive effect on men, and as Michael’s penchant for intelligent argument opens his mind to very frightening insights, Jane sees that men might well have a destructive effect on her in return. At times Michael certainly seems to consider murder as a solution, though who he might murder is not clear, yet for her part Jane experiences a growth in herself, sometimes like a light, other times like a sea, and so holds to what is vulnerable in her, understanding at the crucial point that love tells the truth if you let it, which turns out to be the case in the end.
(back)
CROW STATION – Introduction
CROW STATION, the third novel of THE KINGSWOOD BLACK BOOKS – the Richard Butler tetralogy – was a work that once started did not stop until six hundred and sixty six pages had been written. Then the flood of relief was indistinguishable from a flood of grief. CROW STATION is the biggest of the novels. It contains pages of pure dialogue and pages of pure philosophy. It would be more accessible without the philosophy – and you can easily strip it out – but it would be a lesser work for that. CROW STATION was a gift, is a gift, proof of the reality and power of artistic inspiration
If you read it, read all of it. You won’t be sorry.
CROW STATION – Summary
1985 is a cool wet summer. Dan White and his wife, Charlotte, have a new son, their first. Dan is using the summer vacation to prepare one of those obscure endowed Memorial Lectures that the older universities have accrued over the centuries. He is also intrigued by his discovery that the Cold War is coming to Ireland in a big way, con trails up and down its east and west coasts indicating the kind of edgy manoeuvring that could easily slip out of control.
But they are happy, excepting perhaps Charlotte’s tendency to agonise over her son’s impending loss of innocence. Then Charlotte’s mother is killed in an apparently senseless motor accident and both their lives seem suddenly to change, a switch in levels, as it were, rather than in direction. Charlotte becomes a mother without a mother, a disturbing situation for her which presses her with the question of what she is, child or parent. Dan, for his part, remembers the demise of his own parents, but also acquires a research student with a disturbing take on gender politics and some unwelcome attention for his Cold War theory. Then both Dan and Charlotte discover that they do not know how to mourn, that they cannot comprehend death and its effect on them. So they counter death and a funeral with a birth and a pre-christening party, inviting the mourners to celebrate their son’s birth.
Richard Butler returns to Dublin to climb a mountain while awaiting his publisher’s decision about his latest offering. He is drawn into the circle of a widow and her boisterous teenage daughters, an invitation to become a father without the discomfort of fathering. He is also drawn into the ménage about Dan and Charlotte. And as Richard ascends his mountain to encounter its resident spirit and answer its very pertinent question, Charlotte ascends to her bedroom to restore her mother while Dan finds himself drawn by his research into arcane thoughts that offer him a kind of salvation too.
(back)
SOLOMON’S DREAM – Introduction
SOLOMON'S DREAM, as the final volume of a four-novel cycle relating the life of Richard Butler, marks the culmination of 21 years of artistic endeavour. What has been achieved here, the apotheosis of a modern hero, was possible only through a curious concatenation of ‘coincidences’ or serendipities. Some of this material had been gathered, for other reasons, during the 1980’s, while significant sections had to be worked out on the fly during the writing of SD in the latter half of 1991.
SOLOMON’S DREAM – Summary
The novel is a love story inspired by a curious feature of the life of King Solomon, that though granted the power to understand man he is later condemned for worshipping the god of his wives. The story is set in the West Country and concerns an Irish writer, Richard Butler, escaping London and a failed relationship, who becomes involved with what seems at first a literary coterie but which turns out to be a magic circle intent upon the salvation of a culture. Knowing that magic requires a sacrifice of love, Butler tries to protect the likely victim, only to find himself, through his love for Louise Grainger, the daughter of the hidden master of the circle, intended as the sacerdos of the operation. There ensues a struggle between the magicians and Richard and Louise, pitting the truth of art against the corruptions of
will, that leads the couple to undertake a counter-work of love, an act of purgation intended to define the only possible basis for the regeneration of a corrupted world.
The novel is not an indulgent fantasy, characterisation and the rendering of situations and events are kept within the bounds of conventional realism. Some sections convey imaginative experiences, extensively in the latter half of the novel; these are realised without straining the credulity of the reader (1) by careful preparation of contexts in the first half of the work and (2) by having Butler narrate the work as a journal, which permits the use a range of techniques to juxtapose and overlap different levels of experience. There are, unavoidably, some rebarbative elements, but an attempt is made to redeem these by careful attention to characterisation and motivation, and by the employment of humour, black and not so dark, and, most of all, by insight. (back)
Eight years separated the completion of THE WHITE CITY, the first volume of NOTHING DARKER THAN THE LIGHT, and the second volume, THE LAND OF FIRE. That time was spent studying at a university. Would a trilogy of phantasy novels require that amount of preparation? What if behind the romancing and heroics there appeared some sombre questions? For instance, what is divinity that human beings can either believe or not believe in it? Again, if God is dead, might some human beings not feel the need to replace him in some tangible way?
Anyway, after the BA and the PhD came THE LAND OF FIRE and, in a matter of weeks, the final volume, THE FIELD OF PEACE. Just like that? Just like that. Two years per volume had been planned. All written in a wonderful steady flow in a couple of months. That's how it works, believe me.
THE LAND OF FIRE – Summary
As part of a global strategy to outflank its rival, The Empire has established an outpost to the north of the White City. A small expedition is mounted to investigate the coastline further up the coast and map the northern heavens to aid future navigation. It happens that the Priest-Astronomer charged with the latter task was also instrumental in releasing the prophesy of doom that the Brigan priest, Kandrigi, had tried to keep to himself. It also happens that the Brigan captive who would serve as a guide to the northern lands is the one rumours say was succoured and entertained by the virgin goddess, Agnanna, and who would serve some divine purpose during the coming Last Days.
What should be a routine patrol becomes a world in microcosm suffering extreme stress as all the traditional values and beliefs are undermined by mounting panic and replaced by drastic reactions that threaten to destroy the two ships and their crews.
(back)
THE FIELD OF PEACE – Introduction
As said, THE FIELD OF PEACE came hot on the heels of THE LAND OF FIRE in late 1983. My fear then was that I might fail to do justice to the new scenario that opens in THE FIELD OF PEACE and the transition to a more global perspective. With the exception of some weakness in chapter two, I should not have worried. The central characters continued to lead their own existences, to work out their very individual destinies, as they head towards the final destruction.
I didn't understand the ending for years, thinking that Pol-Chi had failed – and that my artistic vision had been at fault (I had been at fault). But if you consider the following novel, THE BLUE RECORD, as a kind of commentary on NOTHING DARKER THAN THE LIGHT, then you see that dying might be a whole lot more difficult than many believe.
THE FIELD OF PEACE – Summary
The Miracle of the North had different effects on different people. It spurred the aristocratic Priest-Astronomer, Hepteidon, to conceive a world plan to save mankind. All he needed to do first was to take over the Empire, then perhaps create a miracle of his own. Complications, of course, a slave who seems to will his own death just to make a point, an Imperial concubine who might be demanding the impossible of him, and a wily Emperor with an agenda of his own.
Hepteidon will need his old companions from the Miracle days to help sort out the mess. Trouble is, the kind of help they bring is not quite what he is hoping for...
(back)
THE BLUE RECORD – Introduction
To compose a novel about characters existing on the verge of consciousness only required an enormous amount of consciousness on my part. Everything in their world as it effects them had to be accounted for, both the subtle side events and the endlessly repetitive detail of their machine environment.
Does it work? It will put you to sleep, almost. The repetition will come to bore you, almost. Then the pathos will seep in as characters try to attract the attention of the sun, try to understand themselves in terms of the machines that surround them, try to communicate with each other.
Does it work? It does.
Welcome to human immortality.
THE BLUE RECORD – Summary
The time has come when man reaches the peaks of achievement promised by science. All the functions on Earth are now controlled by the World Machine, which is programmed to maintain the World Pattern indefinitely. Thus mankind has at last achieved immortality, kept alive for ever by the World Machine.
This system has survived now for many thousands of years. Perhaps in order in maintain a residual meaningfulness for human life in the World Pattern, slots are provided in the various tasks undertaken by the World Machine for human involvement, when individuals are revived in order to go through a series of routines from time to time.
One such routine is the periodic war between the North and the South. Gorj is the Leader of the South and he has performed this ritual on many occasions over the millennia. But now there has been a slight accident with a Northern craft and Gorj is instructed to help the pilot of the craft who has been injured. It is the first direct contact between human beings since they became immortal.
The outcome is devastating. Gorj’s behaviour become more and more erratic. Symer, the World Agent, whose task it is to maintain order among the human Immortals, in turn becomes disturbed as he tries to counteract the shocking effects Gorj has on other Immortals. In time Symer’s conditioning breaks down completely, which permits the awakening of the one power that mankind cannot completely control, memory – and its truths. (back)
THE KINGSWOOD BLACK BOOKS – Introduction
THE KINGSWOOD BLACK BOOKS form the second sub-cycle and comprise the four novels, THE FOURTH MAN, LUPITA, CROW STATION and SOLOMON'S DREAM, that provide an account of the life of Richard Butler. The origins of the tetralogy lie in an initial unconscious impulse in the 1960s which only came to full conscious in the early 1980s, after the trilogy, NOTHING DARKER THAN THE LIGHT, had been completed.
In a very real sense, perhaps owing to the way in which the first elements of the tetralogy – which now form much of THE FOURTH MAN – came into being, the biography of Richard Butler is an unavoidably provisional affair. Little of it has been revised – and that only for reasons of clarity of sense – and even less has been rewritten. Each novel had in a way only one chance of being written and we get only what could be captured on the first attempt.
There is no standard against which Richard Butler can be measured. He exists in a void, and his whole world therefore exists in a void. That is the nature of freedom.
The interesting question for me now is this: does the reader get more than one chance to read the tetralogy?
THE FOURTH MAN – Introduction
This in a way is the first novel. It was not conceived as such but it was composed in most of its parts before THE WHITE CITY, the first novel to be written as such. THE FOURTH MAN has roots in stories begun in the sixties and composed from then until the early eighties. A mixture of overweening ambition and fundamental spiritual timidity would have prevented the realisation of the work before the NOTHING DARKER THAN THE LIGHT trilogy had been completed.
However, once the novel had been compiled, its four by four structure was seen to provide the underlying structure for the whole cycle of novels.
THE FOURTH MAN itself is the first novel of the Richard Butler tetralogy, THE KINGSWOOD BLACK BOOKS.
THE FOURTH MAN – Summary
The novel is about the sentimental education of an Irish man, Richard Butler. Given the limited possibilities of the biographical novel, the experiences of Butler are conveyed by means of sixteen episodes that concentrate on the key incidents in his life between childhood and his mid-thirties. These sixteen episodes are arranged in four sections of four episodes each. The sections are not titled but they concern, in turn, the family, the group, the social, and the individual, the final section indicating the meaning of the title of the work: the moral imperative that we achieve (what can best be called for now) individuality.
THE FOURTH MAN is an attempt to describe on one hand the fragmentary nature of modern life, the experience of disconnection and decentred-ness, yet on the other hand, the intense aura of significance t
A variety of narrative techniques has been used to achieve this end, ranging from first and third person narration, variable focus on Butler, rhetorical devices like figuration, reinforcement and connotation, and a variety of settings in Ireland, England and Europe. It is hoped that THE FOURTH MAN succeeds in conveying the early life of Richard Butler in a convincing way, and that it also provides for the reader an example of how we ought to interpret the moments of illumination that occur in all our lives.
(back)
LUPITA – Introduction
LUPITA is the second novel of the Richard Butler tetralogy, THE KINGSWOOD BLACK BOOKS. It came to be written in 1987 at the end of a long period of intensive creative activity, so that it both marks the culmination of a significant life-process and the limit of my understanding at that time. SOLOMON’S DREAM, the final volume of the series, written four years later, shows by comparison how my understanding grew in the intervening fallow period.
LUPITA required a great deal of preparation, yet the central motifs of the reed boat and the sea journey only appeared once the work itself was under way. Such is the wisdom of the creative power. But it remains an intimate and affectionate novel, firmly rooted in the ordinary no matter where the creative urge takes us.
LUPITA – Summary
Jane Blake, 37, suddenly leaves her mother, with whom she has lived since the death in a car crash of her fiancé thirteen years previously, to try to make a life of her own before it is too late. This action sparks a profound crisis, and she finds that, living alone for the first time, as well as trying to decide what to do with her new freedom, she must re-examine her life in order to make sense of this freedom, that is, discover who she really is.
This situation is complicated by the competing claims and demands of her family. Her mother, embittered by a life of restriction, might be glad to see the last of a clinging child or might suffer abandonment by the only person who actually cared for her. Her father, long separated from the family and living in England, might want to help his favourite daughter without interference from his wife or he might want a housekeeper in old age. Her mother’s lover, Jack, might also want to help his favourite in the family, though this rush of attention could be misunderstood, or else he wants rid of her in order to have her mother to himself. Her sister, Helen, with great ambition for her banker husband, might resent the shifting of the burden of caring for their mother on to her, but complications in her own marriage might just as well tempt her to slip into a relation of dependence, now that her mother has more time for her. These familial pressures heighten old resentments and fears and threaten to draw Jane back into a sterile passivity masked as a capacity to endure suffering, but they also draw out the vulnerable love and sympathy that arise from relations of blood and the long-shared fortunes of family life, feelings that give her an autonomous strength and an integrity that surprises her.
But the most threatening aspect of the crisis is brought to the fore by the attentions of a young man, Michael, who strives to protect himself from the ghost of his dead mother by becoming a philosopher, guarding empty factories at night as a means to developing an ‘open mind’. Jane avoids these attentions at first, but as circumstances draw them together she is obliged to relive her previous disastrous relations with men. Richard, who said he loved her and whom she abandoned alone in a foreign city, and Terry, who was wealthy enough to marry yet whom she drove to despair and death. She comes to realise she has a destructive effect on men, and as Michael’s penchant for intelligent argument opens his mind to very frightening insights, Jane sees that men might well have a destructive effect on her in return. At times Michael certainly seems to consider murder as a solution, though who he might murder is not clear, yet for her part Jane experiences a growth in herself, sometimes like a light, other times like a sea, and so holds to what is vulnerable in her, understanding at the crucial point that love tells the truth if you let it, which turns out to be the case in the end.
(back)
CROW STATION – Introduction
CROW STATION, the third novel of THE KINGSWOOD BLACK BOOKS – the Richard Butler tetralogy – was a work that once started did not stop until six hundred and sixty six pages had been written. Then the flood of relief was indistinguishable from a flood of grief. CROW STATION is the biggest of the novels. It contains pages of pure dialogue and pages of pure philosophy. It would be more accessible without the philosophy – and you can easily strip it out – but it would be a lesser work for that. CROW STATION was a gift, is a gift, proof of the reality and power of artistic inspiration
If you read it, read all of it. You won’t be sorry.
CROW STATION – Summary
1985 is a cool wet summer. Dan White and his wife, Charlotte, have a new son, their first. Dan is using the summer vacation to prepare one of those obscure endowed Memorial Lectures that the older universities have accrued over the centuries. He is also intrigued by his discovery that the Cold War is coming to Ireland in a big way, con trails up and down its east and west coasts indicating the kind of edgy manoeuvring that could easily slip out of control.
But they are happy, excepting perhaps Charlotte’s tendency to agonise over her son’s impending loss of innocence. Then Charlotte’s mother is killed in an apparently senseless motor accident and both their lives seem suddenly to change, a switch in levels, as it were, rather than in direction. Charlotte becomes a mother without a mother, a disturbing situation for her which presses her with the question of what she is, child or parent. Dan, for his part, remembers the demise of his own parents, but also acquires a research student with a disturbing take on gender politics and some unwelcome attention for his Cold War theory. Then both Dan and Charlotte discover that they do not know how to mourn, that they cannot comprehend death and its effect on them. So they counter death and a funeral with a birth and a pre-christening party, inviting the mourners to celebrate their son’s birth.
Richard Butler returns to Dublin to climb a mountain while awaiting his publisher’s decision about his latest offering. He is drawn into the circle of a widow and her boisterous teenage daughters, an invitation to become a father without the discomfort of fathering. He is also drawn into the ménage about Dan and Charlotte. And as Richard ascends his mountain to encounter its resident spirit and answer its very pertinent question, Charlotte ascends to her bedroom to restore her mother while Dan finds himself drawn by his research into arcane thoughts that offer him a kind of salvation too.
(back)
SOLOMON’S DREAM – Introduction
SOLOMON'S DREAM, as the final volume of a four-novel cycle relating the life of Richard Butler, marks the culmination of 21 years of artistic endeavour. What has been achieved here, the apotheosis of a modern hero, was possible only through a curious concatenation of ‘coincidences’ or serendipities. Some of this material had been gathered, for other reasons, during the 1980’s, while significant sections had to be worked out on the fly during the writing of SD in the latter half of 1991.
SOLOMON’S DREAM – Summary
The novel is a love story inspired by a curious feature of the life of King Solomon, that though granted the power to understand man he is later condemned for worshipping the god of his wives. The story is set in the West Country and concerns an Irish writer, Richard Butler, escaping London and a failed relationship, who becomes involved with what seems at first a literary coterie but which turns out to be a magic circle intent upon the salvation of a culture. Knowing that magic requires a sacrifice of love, Butler tries to protect the likely victim, only to find himself, through his love for Louise Grainger, the daughter of the hidden master of the circle, intended as the sacerdos of the operation. There ensues a struggle between the magicians and Richard and Louise, pitting the truth of art against the corruptions of
The novel is not an indulgent fantasy, characterisation and the rendering of situations and events are kept within the bounds of conventional realism. Some sections convey imaginative experiences, extensively in the latter half of the novel; these are realised without straining the credulity of the reader (1) by careful preparation of contexts in the first half of the work and (2) by having Butler narrate the work as a journal, which permits the use a range of techniques to juxtapose and overlap different levels of experience. There are, unavoidably, some rebarbative elements, but an attempt is made to redeem these by careful attention to characterisation and motivation, and by the employment of humour, black and not so dark, and, most of all, by insight. (back)