It is curious how books that I have picked up have fitted together and made me reflect. These are arbitrary occurences but perhaps not so random as they may seem. The White Darkness and Timequake were both books that I had identified as ones I wanted to read and they happened to be available from the library at the same time, albeit from different libraries (we are a rural region and the library stock of books is spread over several small towns, storage and the mobile libraries, it is fun to visit unfamiliar ones). The Raw Shark Texts is my own, a book I bought a while ago and sits with the pile of other books set on their sides to accusingly remind me 'you meant to read me, well, come on'.
These three books are all in their own ways about worlds and words. The White Darkness deals in part with a man's belief in a hollow globe with spheres within spheres, accessed by holes at the north and south poles. It is a madness that drives him to kill and in his obsession drag the daughter of his dead partner to the south pole to access this hole. Her defence from the truth is in words, a litany of names for the different types of ice and the sculptures created by ice and wind that bewitch the eye and mind. I was listening to this on a PlayAway mp3 player, a device that allowed me to be listening to stories of the arctic whilst walking up rather less chilly roads but still cold November in Scotland. Both Sim and Victor are balanced on the edge of madness, Sim locked away in her mind with Titus, a madness that ultimately saves her, and Victor believing in something we're never quite sure isn't untrue, it is a darkness that makes us question our own sanity and ideas of obsession and truth
I had simultaneously been reading Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake, his quirky semiautobiographical musings on life, there's some really deep stuff in there but Vonnegut treads lightly, like Pratchett and Adams (Douglas) cloaking the intelligence in humour. Here there is no question, this is clearly science fiction and any kind of insanity is freely allowed. You can laugh at the madness.
In The Raw Shark Texts, which I devoured (no pun intended), the madness is unclear and we are constantly on quicksand. Hall brutally reminds us that as readers we are at the mercy of writers, especially when they are as compelling as this and I could not tear myself away from the unfolding terror. Who is to say that dementia is not the product of predators feeding on our memories, it can certainly feel like that when you touch on the horror, like a sore tooth, of the idea of losing your memories and therefore sense of what you are, what you did, what your values created and what you were responsible for. The idea of looking into a face of a beloved and all they are being gone, replaced by a blank minded stranger. The way Hall plays with text as well as the concepts of word/worlds is brilliant, and I thank Ballard that I'd read some of his stuff before reading this, I might not have coped with the swerves of unreality and Hall's demands that you hold two contradictory opinions of events (is it all in Eric's mind, or is it real) right up until the end.
With all three books the brink of madness is a subject, strange that I'd come to them together but I've learned not to question synchronicty too much, it comes because it does. Being reminded that our worlds are constructions of our perception can be terrifying until you realise that this is all we have and taking security in that, these worlds ARE our worlds and to live in them completely is all we can do in our limitations, Tralfalmadorians may pity us unable to see the great sweep of time but I like perception the way we have it...
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