THE DOLT’S TALE by Elizabeth Bowen
“Dot-and-carry-one”
This is the maddest story I have ever read. 1944, it says. In London. Far more Mysterious than even Kôr! Why do I not remember first reading it? My mother listened to doodlebugs before they cut out. She told me about them. Here a male narrator who rambles neatly enough, I guess, and is the dolt, to go with the doodles and someone’s duodenal? Well, his chat starts at a club and those he meets, Margery and her so-called husband, Ken Timpson, and shenanigans and someone is a saboteur, but who?
“Joining up at the club, we would then trool out to their place, Ken running me back into town again next morning.”
A saboteur is worse than an unreliable narrator, I say. Another hanger-on, Denis, is in the art world and he is a ‘sissy’. Who’s getting off on whom? Who the troll, who the victim? And there is even a co-vivid dream to match our days of lockdown with the war then, and the madnesses that prevailed then and now.
“It was like the sort of dream that you are told about, which I have I am glad to say never had. Not, I mean, like any form of real life – in that I think I may say I always know where I am.”
I really think Bowen is a prophetic genius through her preternature of literature, making her even alive today beyond her coastal haunt in 1973! But what happened to Margery’s dog, her clumping mules and the Timpsons’ ever unseen kid? What happened to us? Who among us still waits the next jolt with bated breath?
“As it was, there was a silence over the Timpsons’ place like there is overhead when a doodlebug has cut out: that or something or other gave me gooseflesh.”
- My review of Chapter 14 of Julia Parry’s “Shadowy Third” book, concerning doodlebugs etc.: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/03/02/the-shadowy-third-julia-parry/#comment-21114
So if the narrator dolt was a shadowy third, in this mad troilism, who was Denis? — troilism or trollism!
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All my ongoing reviews of Bowen stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/10/05/the-collected-stories-of-elizabeth-bowen/
The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews 
My previous reading and review before writing above (here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/10/06/nightscript-7/#comment-23213) quoted: “A little too dollish, too Dali, but still—they followed us into our restless dreams.”