…climate change sky pareidolia globally reflected beneath it…

MOONLIT LANDSCAPE WITH BRIDGE by Zadie Smith

“…to hold his crushed elbow together.”

There are four significant mentions in this story of the Interior Minister’s Elbow… The Elbow is very important in this story, but has anyone mentioned it before! The Epitome of Elbow that fits what has obsessed most of my book reviews over recent months. A leitmotif that works mysteriously. Meanwhile, this modest proposal of a Swiftian fable tells of the Interior Minister escaping a small country after a weather disaster, but he still decides to stop his car going to the airport to distribute needed water to the swarming masses but later he foolhardily stops the car again, ironically for a pee, then being accosted and reminded of his own backstory by a Devil or Devil’s Advocate half-recognised from a shared past — a freedom fighting or idealistic or impulsive past? It is an obliquely prophetic allegory of today’s UK, the animals rescued from Afghanistan and other evacuation problems, or the Interior Ministerial attitude today to the Ukraine refugees, and much else mixed-motive impulsive Prime Ministerial, by comparing9 the narrow ‘agonising’ now ‘Ungodly’ Christian spirit versus the amplitude of some other creeds. The eponymous Aert van der Neer painting and its climate change sky pareidolia globally reflected beneath it, as some sort of subconscious literary trigger of such a prophecy?
Tomorrow, it may turn out to have prophesied something else that has not yet happened.

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Full context of above review here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2022/04/14/the-penguin-book-of-the-contemporary-british-short-story-part-two/

“Think of that revelation Shakespeare put in the mouth of King John: ‘Now my soul has elbow room!’ “
— Zadie Smith