Three novellas by John Fraser with the related theme of friendship:
The two cities in Cities on the Plain, on a Hill are the new Jerusalem on the hill, Sodom and Gomorrah on the plain - destinations for Ahmed and Nico, two ex-pats and best friends. Ahmed, an ex-dancer, interested in the law and justice, becomes an amateur judge and Nico, ex-soldier, poetaster, small-time dealer, comes to reside in a city run by drug-cartels.
What does it mean, to leave something of oneself? The protagonist of Fame is engaged to follow the past life of an ancient, who hopes to achieve a kind of immortality. The trip involves re-running many adventures of the ancient's women, sentimental, tough. He is fixated with goldsmithing, a re-visiting of the Sarmatians, an archaic steppe people. There is a failed robbery in Ukraine, periods of virtual bondage, prison counselling. The search for a life which is one's own leads to an encounter with survivors of catastrophe, and ultimately to a vital encounter...
Seeking a clean start should be easy. But in Cleansing there are mysteries, situations not resolved, friends who lead astray and who you lead astray. Art should be able to present a clean vision, but does not. Street cleaning never starts and never ends. Besides, you witness what you ought not see. Living poor, joining the military - both choices imply different kinds of cleanliness, but ultimately, the prospect seems that of wild horses, tattoed on human skin.
Industry Reviews
One of the most extraordinary publishing events of the past few years has been the rapid, indeed insistent, appearance of the novels of John Fraser. There are few parallels in literary history to this almost simultaneous and largely belated appearance of a mature œuvre, sprung like Athena from Zeus’s forehead; and the novels in themselves are extraordinary. I can think of nothing much like them in fiction. Fraser maintains a masterfully ironic distance from the extreme conditions in which his characters find themselves. There are strikingly beautiful descriptions, veiled allusions to rooted traditions, unlikely events half-glimpsed, abrupted narratives, surreal but somehow apposite social customs.
Fraser’s work is conceived on a heroic scale in terms both of its ideas and its situational metaphors. If he were to be filmed, it would need the combined talents of a Bunuel, a Gilliam, a Cameron. Like Thomas Pynchon, whom in some ways he resembles, Fraser is a deep and serious fantasist, wildly inventive. The reader rides as on a switchback or luge of impetuous attention, with effects flashing by at virtuoso speeds. The characters seem to be unwitting agents of chaos, however much wise reflection the author bestows upon them. They move with shrugging self-assurance through circumstances as richly-detailed and as without reliable compass-points as a Chinese scroll.
(John Fuller, poet, novelist, Booker Prize nominee and Whitbread Award winner)
