World Famous Comics: Tours of the Black Clock: A Novel
Tours of the Black Clock: A Novel
By: Steve Erickson Publisher: Simon & Schuster Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 320 Publication Date: February 01, 2005 Studio: Simon & Schuster
Product Description: Cutting a terrifying path from a Pennsylvania farm to the Europe of the 1930s, Banning Jainlight becomes the private pornographer of the world's most evil man. In a Vienna window, he glimpses the face of a lost erotic dream, and from there travels to the Twentieth Century's darkest corner to confront its shocked and secret conscience. One of Steve Erickson's most acclaimed novels, Tours of the Black Clock crosses the intersections of passion and power and gazes into a clock with no face, where memory is the gravity of time and all the numbers fall like rain.
Muddled ^ It's easy to write nonsense. This isn't literature. It is muddled nonsense. The beginning and ending is readable, but there is a large section, a little past halfway, that is pure torture, making no sense at all, that should have been edited out. I'd say it is a quarter of the book.
There are several impossible realities here. To put the brightest and most charitable light on this work of nonsense, it is an alternative history, where Hitler does not invade Russia, but rather invades and conquers England, and then attacks America.
I like alternative history. But that is only a departure point for this book. It is only 5 percent of this book. The other 95 percent is about various characters, Banning Jainlight, a number of women, one or more of them apparently the same as Geli Raubal, Hitler, and some others.
This book never should have been published. It isn't good enough. The author is an egomaniac to believe that his garbled nonsense is worth reading.
The best part of the book is when Banning discovers that his brothers have taken him to rape his own mother, and he kills one of the brothers. That's a bit of happiness in a very dark and muddled mass of nonsense that I can't even call a story.
Prose or fiction? ^ As a poet Steve Erickson was transformational for me. There are chapters in this book that compare, for me, to some of the greatest poetry ever written. This fact alone makes this book well worth reading, but the story itself merits a second glance as well. Reality is layered, overlapping, runs paralell, perpendicular, through time, through fantasy. There are few fiction writers brave enough to make so tangible and palpable their characters turmoil, being too anchored to what they feel is real. But writing fiction opens up possibilities that even fewer writers truly ever tap. Steve Erickson has done just that. And does it magnificently time and again. As magnificent as Arc d'X is I would have to call this book, Tours of the Black Clock, Erickson seminal work.
Lost on the Tour ^ Ocassionally confusing but full of profound ideas. The alternate, parallel history plays like a dream. A fully layered but ultimately flawed book, with breaths of the brilliance Erickson will display later.
Twilight trip to an alternative version of the 20th Century ^ Steve Erickson claims kinship with authors Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon, and its easily to see why. Like those authors, he subtly twists the nature of reality and history until it resembles the inner (both philosophical and pyschological) landscapes of his characters. This novel is about white-haired Marc and his mother, who live on a small island in the middle of a fog-shrouded river in the Pacific Northwest. They have an estranged relationship with each other, stemming from the fact that Marc doesn't know who his father is, and his mother will not speak to him about her past. One day, he comes home and finds her with a dead man at her feet. The image so disturbs him that he will not set foot on the island for about 20 years. He takes over the ferry that shuttles tourists back and forth. He finally goes back to the hotel where his mother lives, in search of a mysterious girl who has not stepped back onto the return ferry to the mainland, and runs into his m! other. The ghost of the dead man is still at her feet, and he tells both mother and son of his strange history. Banning Jainlight was the bastard son of a farmer and his Native American slave mistress in the earlier part of the century. He ends up burning down the farm, killing one of his half-brothers, and crippling both his father and his step-mother for the cruelty they inflicted on him. He runs away to New York City, and several years later, ends up in Vienna, Austria, where he writes pornography for a powerful client in the newly ascendant Nazi Regime. He bases his writings on the strange, surreal sexual encounters he has with a young woman who lives across the street from him. In his writings, he transforms her features and her name to resemble those of the client's -- who is, of course, Hitler -- long lost love. Bear in mind, that this is just a brief description of this novel. Jainlight's story sparks off the no-less compelling story of Marc's mother, that mov! es from pre-Revolutionary Russia, sub-Saharan Africa, and P! ost-war New York City. Moving across dreams and reality, fantasy and history, this dense novel weaves together such unlikely themes as relationships between lovers and parents; the nature of good and evil; and the quest for identity. The images and instance in this novel are numerous and unforgettable: a woman who can kill men with the wild beauty of her dancing and menstruates flower petals; a city that's in the middle of a lagoon, and covered by blue tarps; a burial ceremony where the dead are hung upside-down on trees until they can speak their names; a herd of silver buffalo who run through the plains of Africa and North America. The writing is lovely and lyrical. This is a great novel!
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