postmodernism – Lights In The Sky

Having your mind made up for you

By C Stevens | 26th February 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

I don’t normally blog twice in any one month, but this time my hand has been forced. Reading the Guardian online yesterday I noticed that a novelist I have read (and have a certain regard for) Kazuo Ishiguro, has a new book out. All well and good, but the problem lies in the title, as his new book is called Klara and the Sun. I read the article and noted that, sure enough, Klara is some kind of robot!

Now at this point I need to point out that my Klara is a character originally introduced in my fourth Lights in the sky novel, The leftover girl, which makes her roughly five years old. While it’s entirely possible that Mr Ishiguro was already writing his recently-published novel five years ago, the chances are that I got there first. I originally took the name ‘Klara’ from another science fiction novel, Gateway, by the late Fred Pohl. In this novel Klara is the protagonist’s dead lover, and (if my memory serves me correctly) serves a similar narrative function to Kris Kelvin’s dead wife in Stanislaw Lem’s best known work, Solaris.

However, I’m unknown and unpublished, Kazuo Ishiguro is internationally famous, so I’m going to have to change the title of the eighth Lights in the sky novel. This is fine as Klara was only a placeholder until something better came along. So, I’ve decided that the novel will now be called Finding your place. Needless to say, this title is also currently provisional. What I won’t change is the name of my character.

The chances of this coincidence ever coming to Mr Ishiguro’s attention are remote, but if they do, I’m quite ready to defend myself against any charges of plagiarism. I would point out that I have been writing about self-aware vaguely-humanoid robots in the Lights in the sky series for roughly eight years now (I submitted the short story that kicked off the series to Analog SF magazine in April 2013, in fact).

It would also be a source of amusement to me that anyone would ever compare us as novelists, as we couldn’t be more different. I have read one of Ishiguro’s novels (The Remains of the Day, which I enjoyed), I started Never let me go but got bored halfway through. Mr Ishiguro comes across to me as a miniaturist, with the action of his books seeming to take place mainly in airless rooms, while mine range through time and space. We both may have postmodern elements in our work, but make use of vastly-different source materials for very different purposes.

Nevertheless, I have the man to thank for finally forcing me to make a decision…

The Author February 2021

Art overtaken by events

By C. E. Stevens | 5th November 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

Apologies for not blogging at all during the month of October, hopefully this entry will make up for that.
I’m imagining a conversation with the taciturn proprietor or sales assistant at the nearby corner shop (I can never work out which he is), not that we have conversations, as such. He’s asking me what I think of lockdown/life nowadays/the US Election (delete as appropriate), and I say that I don’t think things will ever go back to what we regarded as normal before the pandemic. I go on to offer the following opinion,
“…in a funny way, it’s actually a privilege to be living in such an epoch-making period in human history, but you’ve always got to bear in mind that the Chinese had an old (and possibly apocryphal!) curse, ‘…may you live in interesting times!’”
The shop assistant or proprietor doesn’t react to this, but outside the four walls of his rather down-at-heel emporium those ‘interesting times’ grind on relentlessly…
I’ve recently been re-reading In other Worlds by the redoubtable Margaret Atwood and I was struck by how prescient her views on the future direction of civilisation were. Taken from the point of view of 2011, Ms Atwood seems to have predicted 2020 with a scary degree of accuracy.
In my fictional universe, we are coming to the end of the seventh novel in the Lights in the sky series. I’m actually writing the last chapter (chapter twenty four in this particular book!), but as with all last chapters there is a lot to do, character arcs to complete, loose ends to tie up etc etc, so it’s taking a time to finish.
There are other reasons for this dilatoriness; it’s always horrible to let go of a particular story, and I know that before the end of …when you wish upon a star, I will need to do beastly things to characters I’ve grown to love. But that’s the nature of fiction writing.
And it’s not the end of the series; volume eight is already under way, and there will be at least one more short story after that…
I recently came across an x and y axis representation of literary genres, whereby the x axis moves between naturalism at the top and expressionism below, and the y axis between the mimetic on the left, over to the fantastic. This results in four classification quadrants, labelled as follows: top left Realist, top right Speculative, bottom left Stylized, bottom right Fabulist.
The compiler had helpfully produced two versions of the diagram, locating various literary subgenres in each quadrant in the first, and various authors in the second, and I amused myself by locating my own writing within this design, based on my influences and my artistic and ideological leanings. Following these, I would place myself close to the intersection of the x and y axes, within the Fabulist quadrant; this quadrant also contains magical realism, fairy tales and postmodernism, and even a cursory reading of the novels within Lights in the sky demonstrates the debt I owe to all of these. My attachment to the gothic takes me close to the x axis, and the near future, SF and high fantasy elements ensure my work’s proximity to the y axis and the Speculative quadrant.
All of which goes to demonstrate that I steer well clear of Realism as defined by nineteenth century writers and critics. This was always going to be the case given my attachment to Romanticism and my use of speculative and fantastic elements, but does not mean my writing lacks realism.
In recent years, the cultural analysis inherent in nineteenth century notions of ‘realism’ has been rather overtaken by events, as what was previously seen as ‘speculative’, ‘fantastic’, and ‘belonging to the realm of science fiction’ has remorselessly forced its way into our lives and become the mainstream.
So, welcome to your own personal disaster movie/gothic fantasy/near future SF miniseries (delete as appropriate) and despite what the man in the corner shop may think, the times are definitely ‘interesting’ and we have no choice but to live through them.
The Author November 2020

Standing on the brink

By C. E. Stevens | 2nd July 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

We find ourselves at a curious point in our history…
For the last four months all our lives have effectively been on hold in the deep freeze of lockdown. This will change on July 4th, and the mood is best described as impatience mixed with apprehension.
On the one hand, we yearn to break free of the cage we’ve been imprisoned in; to see friends and family properly, to get a haircut, to be able to walk round our local town or city centre, go on holiday or visit a tourist destination, have a meal in a restaurant or a drink in a pub.

On the other hand, we fear that the true consequences of the pandemic and the response to it will now be revealed. These range from the prosaic; merely walking down the nearest high street and noticing how many businesses have closed, never to re-open; to the intensely personal, when one finds one’s job has disappeared and furlough payments are about to end; to a general realisation of how much of the life we knew has now gone, possibly forever.
In the UK, this encompasses a virtual cessation of all live arts performance, with theatres, dance performances, concerts and gigs all now only available remotely, or through recorded performances, combined with the indefinite suspension of public participation in most team sports and indoor recreation opportunities. This is just a sample of things we have lost, new things occur to me constantly, but it’s impossible to keep it all in your mind.

However, the general conclusions are bleak:

* Arts, culture and learning will be disproportionately affected, as populist governments concentrate on mainstream activities to the detriment of anything highbrow, intellectual, radical or alternative
* Life will move decisively online with virtual experience being privileged over physical interaction, and that this will persist, even when the pandemic ends

For understandable reasons, my own ‘virtual world’, the Lights in the sky series provides a welcome and much needed escape. There are now only three more chapters (plus two more ‘interludes’) to be written before the series is complete…

I wonder what I will do then?

The Author July 2020

Housekeeping

By C. E. Stevens | 29th August 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Housekeeping
Lights in the sky is many things: it’s a vast sprawling meta-novel of ideas and scientific, philosophical, societal, economic and theological speculations; its a series of picaresques; it’s a postmodernist tribute to my sources and influences; it’s a romance, an adventure story, a coming of age novel; it’s a mystery story with the author as detective; it’s all these things and more…
It’s also now finished…
Perhaps I should qualify this; the main narrative is complete, on both on Earth and on Alpha 5, we now know what happens to all of the protagonists, and have a fair idea of what comes next. We have followed our characters (for the most part) from birth to death, and the central enigma behind the world of the series has been laid bare.
However there are a number of other stories within this vast concept (six novels, 2314 pages, and nearly seven hundred thousand words) referenced or alluded to in passing, that I feel deserve to be told, either in short story form, or in additional novels. I’ve already started this process and written a number of short stories, which I intend to collect together at some point, perhaps under the title Tales from the Collapse.
But one or two of these stories would appear to merit a longer treatment. An obvious candidate is the story of the original Marta, Miss da Guia, from her strange conception as part of the breeding programme undertaken by the Alpha Mission, through her unusual childhood in Sao Paulo, her short-lived media stardom, and her brutal and untimely death…
I’ve just remembered that I have title for this putative novel, ‘When You Wish upon a Star’, which plays with various layers of meaning; The Journey to the Stars undertaken by the Alpha Mission carries the hopes of millions marooned on an apparently-dying world, Miss da Guia is a media star worshipped by those millions, and she is following her own star…
Given that the title I have arrived at neatly pitches the novel, I think it’s now highly likely that I will write it.
The other candidate a further volume is the fate of Clara and all the other automatons unlucky enough to have remained on Earth after the departure of the Probe in 2048. The leftover girl hints at the likely fate of such entities towards the end of the novel; Clara has been rejected by her creator Dr Helen Choi, who now sees the robot as the product of her pursuit of false scientific gods, of literally being in error, in Christian terms. By definition Clara is thus demonic, and shares the fate of the Creature rejected by his creator, Victor Frankenstein, in Mary Shelley’s famous novel.
We have also been given a glimpse of the forces of reaction ranged against the Alpha Mission and all its works in the person of the ‘Mayor of Ibara City’, the formidable Ester Almeida, and we know things aren’t going to end well.
I often think that the dichotomy within the series between ‘the scientific vision’ as exemplified by the Alpha Mission, and ‘the spiritual vision’ personified by the Camposettas and their adherents (including eventually Dr Choi), is essentially a dramatisation of a battle that I’ve fought within myself my whole life. A struggle between a belief in science (and its delinquent offspring, technology), and a countervailing attachment to the natural world, primitive socialism, and a non-specific form of spirituality, most akin to Buddhism.
Seen in these terms, Lights in the sky becomes an actualization of this inner debate…
The Author August 2019

Caught in the slipstream?

By C. E. Stevens | 5th July 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

I Have just come across a new literary genre, ‘slipstream’, of which I’d previously been unaware. I was guided to it by the work of Anna Kavan, a literary hero of mine, when I paid a tribute to the style and language of her most famous novel, Ice, by pastiching it at the beginning of chapter twenty of Maya. I’d previously always regarded Anna Kavan as a science fiction writer (albeit a very strange one), but when I looked up her Wikipedia article, I found out that apparently she’s now classified as part of the Slipstream movement, the term being coined by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling in 1989.
This has led me to research the genre via Wikipedia in order to see if some of what I write falls within this classification…
If we look at the characteristics ascribed to slipstream genre fiction and compare it that which characterises my fiction we should be able to answer that question.
Firstly a health warning; Lights in the sky, as I’ve argued a number of times in this blog, shifts between genres in the course of each book (sometimes in the course of an individual chapter), which in itself is postmodernist.
Slipstream fiction is often seen as the ‘literature of strangeness’ and will employ epistemological and ontological questioning of the nature of reality. Epistemology interrogates the distinction between objective and subjective viewpoints; my fiction constantly (from chapter twelve of A Children’s Crusade onwards) contrasts these two modes. Ontology is essentially about the nature of being, which has become the principal concern of Lights in the sky.
James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, editors of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology argue slipstream makes use of cognitive dissonance (i.e. simultaneously holding two or more contradictory beliefs, values, or attitudes). I’m not sure I really do that in my fiction, if we disregard the truism that such contradictory thinking is a part of the human condition.
Kelly and Kessel go on to argue that slipstream disrupts the realist narrative, avoids the traditional fantasy tropes, and is essentially postmodernist in form.
I’d say probably one out of three on this count…
I embrace traditional fantasy tropes rather than avoiding them, what I tend to do is make creative use of the archetypes contained within them (mainly derived from folk tales and mythology), and refer to them to add depth to my prose.
I also think that I strive to make those parts of the narrative that sit in the real world realistic, although this is not (I think) literary realism in the nineteenth century sense. I’m not constantly disrupting this narrative, rather there are two narrative spaces within all of my recent novels, two narrative streams that run on parallel; one is the physical world, the other a liminal space which intrudes into the ‘real world’ in the form of dreams and visions, but sometimes supplants the everyday world. Tata’s stay amongst the Tupi people when she believes she exists outside of time, is an example of this.
What I do acknowledge are the various postmodernist elements to my writing…
I won’t go through all of the postmodernist aspects present in my ouvre as I’ve discussed these at length in previous blogs, but for the purposes of this blog I will focus on three of them.
I make use of an unreliable narrator on occasion (Nancy, in case you hadn’t noticed), my text embodies the use of paradox (a recent example being Joel’s contention at the start of chapter twenty, ‘…the paradox inherent in technology…is that it makes the world available to us (in an unprecedented way!) while simultaneously destroying it…’, and I frequently employ a fractured narrative…
So what’s my conclusion?
I don’t think that what I write is slipstream, I merely make use of some of the techniques that form the basis of this genre. But I also make use of techniques and narrative forms from multiple genres. If I were to characterise my fiction I would say it is mainstream science fiction with a postmodern sensibility…
’Til next time
The Author – July 2019

A secondary world?

By C. E. Stevens | 10th May 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

A secondary world?

I viewed a rather ancient, but nevertheless interesting, documentary on JRR Tolkien on YouTube recently. The documentary was made well before Peter Jackson’s filming of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and concentrated on the books, with keynote contributions from Tolkien’s youngest son, Christopher…
Christopher Tolkien discussed his father’s concept of Middle Earth as a ‘secondary world’, that is to say an alternate reality that works by different rules, a notion that (amazingly) I was unfamiliar with; and the more he talked, the more it occurred to me that Lights in the sky, is in many regards, an example of this.
So I did some research on the concept and concluded that, although I’ve tended to think of myself as a writer of ‘realistic SF’, there are many of the elements of a secondary world in the series, particularly in the three novels set on Alpha 5. So without knowing it, I have (in some ways) been writing a work of high fantasy.
Now it’s important to keep a sense of proportion here. I have taken considerable care to make LITS as plausible and scientifically credible as possible, and what I have just said in no way invalidates any of that. But the series is many things not just one, and incorporates various literary tropes. At the end of the day it is also a work of the imagination.
Different books within the sextet are fantastic to a greater or lesser degree; After the Flood is definitely the volume with the most tenuous connexion to high fantasy, but both the books that feature Marta Camacho have long passages that dive headlong into the genre. In particular Ms Camacho’s journey down the Amazon River on her raft, following her departure from the riverboat Fitzcarraldo, which is deliberately presented in dreamlike terms.
But it’s the original trilogy that cleaves most closely to the idea of a secondary world. We have a series of novels that takes the form of a bildungsroman. The protagonist is a child when the action opens, but grows into adulthood, and comes into powers and skills beyond those of ordinary person back on Earth, although in my world these have a technological source. Marta Fernandes is also to all intents and purposes an orphan. The theme of good versus is central to the series, but the question of who is good? and who who is evil? is often indeterminate, and is left unresolved until the end of the series. This is where I mostly part company with most fantasy writers, as in my world relativism is part of the underlying philosophy. Thus the Alphanians are presented at different times (and in different ways) as both an apparent threat to the eventual triumph of good, and as its most effective proponents. The same can be said (to a lesser degree) about the Artificial Intelligence fronted by Nurse Six Gee.
The World of the series is revealed to be illusory, in the sense that the World is not as it appears to be, by a series paradigm shifts in the first three novels. A similar process is now taking place in the denouement of Maya, which I am currently writing. And at the end of the day there are beings within this cosmos whose powers are to all intents and purposes Godlike, and therefore (as far as the human actors are concerned) magical…
The Author May 2019

Island: analogy and its uses

By C. E. Stevens | 28th March 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Island: analogy and its uses
I came up with a neat and (I think) apposite analogy recently while writing chapter fifteen of Maya, imagining the Edgbaston campus of the University of Birmingham (a future version features as a setting) as an island in a sea of ordinary concerns.
I thought further and applied the analogy (on a larger scale) to an England, ‘…separated geographically, politically and culturally from its European neighbours and the wider world,’ post-Brexit. It then occurred to me that the same analogy applied to my writing (and this blog), given that I am largely talking to myself here.
The analogy continues to gather force and gobble up more territory as I’m currently suffering from a painful and debilitating ailment which makes the ordinary tasks of daily life challenging, makes it harder for me to leave the house, and has the effect of isolating me from the rest of the world (on my own island).
If this is beginning to sound like an extract from one of Kafka’s famous Blue Notebooks (recently brought back to my attention by the music of Hans Richter), then this is apt as I claim him as an influence.
On that cheery note
The Author March 2019

Conspiracy theory

By C. E. Stevens | 5th March 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental twenty four: Conspiracy theory
The final part of Lights in the sky ( and hence of the whole series) centres around a conspiracy theory; the biggest conspiracy theory of all, in fact, that the world, and by extension the whole Universe may not be as we imagine it. That the whole world is actually much younger than we imagine it (in direct opposition to Rupert Giles’ theory that it is, in fact, much older!). That it was actually created by unknown beings for unknown purposes and that consequently we are all property and experimental subjects. If you are thinking so far, so Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s important to realise that Douglas Adams was drawing on an older tradition within SF. This is also a serious book rather than a lighthearted satirical comedy, and my intention is to explore the nature of faith (obviously I’m riffing on Creationism here!), and the psychology of believers.
To the vanishingly small number of people who have read the original Lights in the sky trilogy, this development comes as no surprise as it was already revealed to the Children on Alpha 5.
I started to think (dangerous, I know, in these times!) what if the old stories were actually in some sense true? Not literally, as they have been subject to imperfect transmission, distortion and reinterpretation over the centuries. But that they contain essential truths about the nature of existence that science has been missing.
Now I’m aware that there’s a danger that putative readers will also take what I have written literally, employing the same mindset that takes the Bible (essentially a series of creation myths, parables, and folk tales) literally.
If you think that’s unlikely you’re right, mainly because it’s unlikely that my stories will ever reach a wide enough audience. However the history of the twentieth century teaches us that the most bizarre and far-fetched of notions can become the subject and focus of fanatical belief.
So readers should remember that this is a work of fiction, set in an imaginary world, for the purposes of entertainment and to provoke philosophical debate.
The Author 5th March 2019

A question of attribution

By C. E. Stevens | 8th October 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental twenty: a question of attribution
I’ve finally finished After the Flood, well almost. I’m still playing around with the ending, but it’s in a condition where I can now start submitting to agents.
However a new issue has arisen. After the Flood is a Lights in the Sky novel; although the fifth to be written, it’s actually the first chronologically, set in 2043 (i.e. twenty five years from the present). But I’ve used my mainstream pseudonym, Stephen Clare, whereas all the other LITS novels are under the pen name, C.E. Stevens.
So something has to give; I’m minded to abandon the C.E. Stevens moniker altogether. It has always sounded clumsy to me, whereas Stephen Clare sounds like an author. I imagine him living in a thatched cottage somewhere in the Cotswolds, or tramping the Yorkshire Moors in green wellies and a tweed jacket like a latter day Ted Hughes. Naturally he’ll have chiseled features and probably smoke a pipe, or at least he will have done until told to give up on doctor’s orders.
Anyway, Lights in the Sky started out as a humble trilogy, expanded to a tetralogy, but has now become a pentalogy, and there will be a sixth. The LITS novels are (in order of writing), A Children’s Crusade, The Fixed Stars, The Lost Colony, The Leftover Girl, plus the current volume. The final part of what will be a sextet has the provisional title Maya (or Illusion), and I’ll start this in the New Year.
After the Flood is set in the fictional world of LITS, but in form and subject matter it’s very much a mainstream novel, which just happens to be set a quarter of a century in the future. This continues the trend established with The Leftover Girl, which is mainstream science fiction as opposed to genre SF. The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed the title has changed (formerly it was known as The Great Flood), but I prefer the new title, which is more elegant with its Biblical connotations.
I have made use of a number of literary sources, specifically High-Rise by J.G. Ballard, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, and Dickens’ last completed novel Our Mutual Friend.
These are deployed as thematic references rather than mined for plot or storyline, Every chapter (apart from the first) is prefaced by quotation which refers to the narrative or thematic content in some way. The majority of these quotations are taken from the four main sources, but I do quote other people (including Joe Strummer!).
There is an element of intertextuality at work here. Karen, a journalist, did her degree in English Literature at Birmingham, and the subject of her dissertation was Conrad. Mariyam is deeply affected by reading High-Rise while at University, and the literary interests of other characters impinge on the narrative.
So far, so postmodern, but After the Flood, as well as being a character-led drama is also an adventure story, or rather it’s a series of individual adventures. Some (but not all) intersect, but they are all set against the climate change wrought cataclysm that is the Great Flood of London 2043. In a case of real-life imitating (my) art, I recently read a number of recent articles talking about this very possibility, predicated on our not (as a species) doing anything effective to halt global warming, and sticking our collective heads in the sand rather than planning for the consequences of this.
After the Flood is also my London novel, and before you ask, I did live in London while studying for my first degree, and I also lived in Chelmsford in Essex (a London dormitory town) for a number of years beforehand. A lot of the action in the novel takes place in East London, from the City and the Tower of London, up to Stratford, Forest Gate and Ilford in the north, taking in Wanstead and Dagenham, and proceeding along the Essex side of the River as far as East Tilbury. But there are detours, to the Palace of Westminster, to Teddington Lock, south to Maidstone in Kent, and north to Milton Keynes. And the central part of the narrative is the voyage of the container vessel Ulysses from the Pool of London to Dover. So, a novel about the sea, the River, and London, based in part on first hand knowledge, but also relying on the imagination to conjure its fictional world…
I hope to include an extract on the website in the near future…
Stephen Clare October 2018

Blog entry supplemental fourteen: Symbolism and the unseen guiding hand

By C Stevens | 21st November 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

At many points during the writing of Lights in the sky I have thought I was being guided in some way; but before you reach for the straitjacket I’m not claiming divine revelation or anything along those lines. I am merely repeating the commonplace that a novel (and especially a series of novels) at some stage takes on a life of its own and starts to make its own demands. At this point the ‘author’ becomes its servant rather its master.

At many points during the four year writing period I have wondered where this or that idea came from, and marvelled that something I wrote should fit so perfectly with what had been written previously without me consciously aware of this.

A rational explanation would be that on an unconscious level I knew what was required and framed my prose accordingly; naturally as a Romantic I prefer a more mystical explanation.

Anyway, the reason I’m banging on about this now is that, during one of many revisions of the text, I decided to investigate the symbolism lying behind the references to the natural world that pepper the series. Specifically, I looked up the symbolic meanings of hummingbirds, hibiscus blooms, macaws, monkeys, and jaguars.

I’ll confess I did look up the symbolic meaning of dolphins when I decided that one would play a significant role in the journey of my protagonist, Tata. I was heartened to learn that in Greek Mythology the dolphin carries the spirits of the dead to a new reality. Tata, of course, in symbolic terms dies and is reborn during her journey down the River on her raft, a point I make explicitly at the end of the chapter. It was therefore wholly appropriate that a dolphin should be her ferryman from one mode of being to another. But the point is, I didn’t know any of this (at least on a conscious level) when I made the decision to cast a river dolphin in this role.

I will confess that I did do a similar exercise when I researched the symbolic meanings of rivers, and this has influenced the text of The leftover girl, which (of course) has a journey up the Amazon River at its heart.

Thinking about this later, and noticing that similar references to the natural world recur in the four books, I decided to check out the symbolic meaning of these, and see how well I have done in choosing appropriate symbolic referents elsewhere in the text.

There are a number of references to hummingbirds and red hibiscus flowers dotted throughout the tetralogy, usually the two occurring together!

Hummingbirds represent (and I’m being selective here!), hope, eternity, continuity, and infinity among other things, which would appear to fit with the overall mood and philosophical thrust of the series.

In North America Hibiscus often symbolises the perfect wife or woman (so obviously I’m using it ironically here!), but in China its meaning is different, where it symbolises the fleeting nature of fame, beauty and personal glory! So no exact fit here, but I would argue all of these notions are aspects of the series!

Macaw is more promising territory as the Bororo people (who live close to where the action of The leftover girl takes place) believe they are reincarnated as macaws during the complex of transmigration of souls that forms part of their mythology. So, the right general area; interestingly macaws are seen by much of Amerindian culture as avatars of solar heavenly fire, in opposition to the jaguar which represents the chthonic fire of the underworld!

So, not inappropriate, and symbols which lead me to want to consider afresh the innate symbolic meanings contained within the novel.

Finally, the monkey nearly always represents the trickster, but can also symbolise a need to renew your affectionate ties with friends and relations; so, no real congruence there! Although, interestingly, in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the marmoset is referenced alongside the Brazilian jaguar!

There would seem to be an awful lot of lucky guesses on my part here! or maybe my unconsciousness knows what it’s doing, even if my conscious mind doesn’t!

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