Des Lewis will be 77 years old on 18 January 2025
Those who have read these episodic brainstorming reviews of mine must know they are very personal — rough-shod and spontaneous. Synchronicity and anagram mixed. I know they are not professional, never potentially publishable other than in the madness of my head, but I do hope they show grains of dark truth and cosmic panache.
These Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews were founded in 2008.
‘What’s the loveliest word in the English language, officer? In the sound it makes in your mouth, in the shape it makes on the page? What do you think? Well now, I’ll tell you: E-L-B-O-W. Elbow.’ — THE SINGING DETECTIVE
“How shall a man find his way unless he lose it?” — Walter de la Mare
To any current genre author I have reviewed before — if you have a new story recently published or soon to be published in a collection or anthology, you may have a review by me of the story that also showcases where it is published. See HERE. (This is because I am no longer well enough to review as many books as I once did.)
Fresh Fictions, free to read HERE.
No AI input in preparation of my texts whatsoever.
THE NEW NONSCENIC
Photos here: https://conezero.wordpress.com/2024/02/24/d-f-lewis-recent-photos-1/
Started reading this today.
A coincidence here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/the-race-nina-allan/#comment-3889
“S’pose Heaven’s not like a painting that’s just hanging there … Like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you’re alive, from passing cars, or … upstairs windows when you’re lost…”
This is not a real-time review proper, but I shall report that I am up to page 90 in the hardback, and young Holly’s first person narrative journey – after running away from home in 1984 around Gravesend, Kent, a journey peppered with involuntary periods of Todash – has so far been all-consuming. Including her amusing recall of her Dad’s philosophies of life spoken to the grizzled customers in his pub…
I’ve now read up to page 195 as told by Hugo Lamb the Poshboy conman…literary yet free flowing prose that really appeals to me, Roth, M Amis, you name it. With open Todash shoes. One of the best snowed in scenes in literature when he woos our Holly. I wonder if I am a ‘psychosoterica’ because it seems to me that you need to be one in order to do these real-time reviews as dreamcatchers at all.
I’ve now read up to page 278, covering the 2004 Wedding Bash, a plait of events at a Wedding reception in UK and events in Iraq during the aftermath of the WMD War. Highly readable and compulsive. Fortune telling, Holly’s child going missing, bombs and metaphorical bombshells, and the theory and practice of Journalism.
I’ve now read up to page 383, covering 2015 – 2020 (effectively the SF part of this novel now starting), telling of Crispin Hershey, an author possibly similar to Martin Amis, and a compulsive view of the literary world and Colombian prisons where Crispin abandons someone who wrote a bad review of his novel!
Brittan seems to be similar to Alan Sugar?
All tying in with Holly’s SCRIPT, which reminds me preternaturally of my own Dreamcatcher book reviews. She is ill now, possibly like me, full diagnosis awaited.
“A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synaesthesia and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul and, yes, to a degree , your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardise your relationships and distend your life.”
I have now finished reading the 2025 section ending on page 520. This gets a bit wearing, a sort of explain-all as to why things have happened, a reincarnatory slipstream of souls and bodies with many neologisms, e.g. involving the prefixes psycho- and sub-. But most of it is sheer theosophistry. This book is currently in tournamental combat with Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X (Annihilation from the Southern Reach Trilogy). My earlier review of Area X here.
If the crux of the combat is just with this Psychosoterica section of The Bone Clocks, then VanderMeer wins hands down.
“…my feckless generation trusted our memories to the Net, so the ’39 crash was like a collective stroke.”
I have now finished my subreview of the 2043 section and, thus, of the whole book itself. This last section seems like a musical psychocoda by means of a post-holocaust, where orientalist trade embargoes have become cruelly transgressable cordons and Hinkley’s Point lethally sharpened, as Holly lives on as grandmother, now in her familial Eire become a pre- and post-palimpsest.
There are compelling sections of this book that make it worth reading, but sadly not the last two sections. I feel it has all been a bit multi-subbed. Time now for my own version of a Colombian gaol.
My later review of this author’s CLOUD ATLAS: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/06/24/cloud-atlas-by-david-mitchell/