Two novellas by John Fraser, described by the Whitbread Award winning poet John Fuller, as 'the most original novelist of our time'.
Stardust examines the adventures of the journalist, Hadar. At sea, he and the odious Pietro, a banker cum sailor, are marooned by the shipboard scientists whose expedition has lost contact with land. Hadar's lover, Doctor Chin, is the principal in an experiment into the conversion of humans into marine creatures. The mission is desperate, the participants self-destructive in their wish to make world-saving discoveries. The story explores two connected themes - Hadar's many, unsuccessful relationships under the shadow of Pietro, banks and cashiers, and his memories of following the experiment of a fusion reactor - the attempt to build a star on earth.
Wisdom is something many people seek, though what it is remains uncertain. Raul, a common man, is pledged to seek wisdom, though his life is one of happenstance, rebounding from archaeological expeditions to politics, a grooming for leadership which seems more like a prison, interrogation without purpose but with threats, and finally transformation as a literary and sexual subject. Along his haphazard way, he finds himself in extreme situations where the meaning of 'wisdom' should become more evident. Life and wisdom seem incompatible - but in the end, with an old associate, he continues his quest - in control, but in a landscape of increasing hardship, and isolation.
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 Å"uvre, 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)
