BlackOxford's Reviews > War & War

Over-sharing

Breathless, relentless, urgent, a man on a mission; yet Korin is stuck like Baalam’s Ass, unable to move on a railway footbridge over an industrial wasteland, a prisoner of seven thuggish, homicidal children who could actually care less about him. They are his Greek chorus to whom he feels the need to confess his suicidal intentions and from whom he expects counsel. Korin’s fear of being physically harmed is exactly offset by his fear of not being listened to. The children know he is insane and ignore him instead of killing him.

Korin has lost faith in the world. This is a functional definition of his insanity and the reason for his intended suicide. Nothing he perceives, including his own thoughts, can be trusted. He has concluded that his only alternative is acceptance, submission to the power of a universe and its gods which are imaginary but not illusory. Because Korin has already lost his mind, he is desperately afraid of losing his head, of it literally separating gradually from his body before he completes his mission.

So Korin ‘shares’ with the children... and shares... and shares with everyone else he encounters. He wants them to understand what has happened to him, his epiphany of the senselessness of the world and the task he has. His job as records keeper for the Council, and his avocation as local historian, he recognises, were entirely meaningless. Facts, data, reports never approached anything like the truth. But what can accepting all this mean? He had been creating an artificial world in his head; and now he isn’t anymore. So?

Escaping the children, Korin resumes his mission by travelling to “the very center of the world.” He appears somewhat unsure about where that might be and will take the next flight to anywhere. His loquacious intensity is unremitting and it gets him a ticket to New York City, a visa, a stand-by seat, and the care of a beautiful stewardess, who also thinks he is insane, even if benignly so. Customs and Immigration find him eccentric but otherwise harmless, as do the other people he meets on the streets of NYC.

Although he has lost faith in the gods, he remains a devotee of Hermes, the divine messenger and their general factotum. Hermes has a singular function among the Olympians. He tells stories, eloquently. Korin‘s devotion to Hermes is well-placed even if paradoxical. He has a story to tell, a story of men returning to their homes from war. He found it in his municipal archive. His objective is to publicise it to the world... and die.

This is all somewhat spooky. Written two years before the attacks of 9/11, I’m sure that if the book were more popular in the US there would be conspiracy theories in abundance about it. More likely though, it is a literary artist’s expression of a sort of religious faith in literature. Or rather the obsessive, compulsive need to articulate what one finds important. This need is, of course, as silly and neurotic as any other human need. Perhaps it is even insane. One significant advantage, however, is that it does not involve blowing up buildings.