The Book of Bunk – by Glen Hirshberg
Real-Time Review continued from HERE.
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From “‘Normal for him’” to “drive himself insane with this.”
“…twirling and tilting, shredding the air around her into ribbons, [...] and the knives flew higher and dove down harder,…”
My mention of Paul’s spooning with Melissa becomes more associated with knives! This is an oblique correlative that leads to a tender kiss - as, later, is another such correlative regarding the wasted meat on the pavement echoing Lewis’s initially ostensible treatment of birthday cake in Paul’s past… then Paul is escorted by Robert in the middle of the night to a tableau: a tableau as seen by Paul literally outside the scope of narrative, a group tableau centring upon the Patrol’s scream (or the Platonic Form of Moan from ‘The Janus Tree’ book) now become transfigured into a song’s dance-music; and a gradual realisation that the inter-connections I seek and often falter in convincingly establishing as the text’s pre-existing inter-connections are as nothing when compared to the characters’ own various ’real’ inter-connections that prevailed even before I encountered this book. Possibly even before this book was written: written about Paul’s ‘commonplace book’ project… Written about or by that project? ”…his hair shot off his scalp in a hundred directions…” (6 Apr 12 – 10.55 am bst)
From “…alone in colored Trampleton” to “‘Mr. Cutter,’ I said, ‘could you start from the beginning?’”
“The project had trained me to recognize the moment people slipped into the stories they told themselves.”
A parade or ritual – with Lewis honoured to perform crier for devils as the others shoot guns over the town roofs – is another ingredient of this book’s panoply of Hirshbergian ‘Struwwelpeter’-type tableaux (real or fabricated) and stories-about-stories-within-stories, and judging by the quote above, people-within-people: a new gear-point for double de-clutching the narrative-drive: “the slave shift“. Coloreds as part of the role-play, in or out of downtrodden character. And a startling repeat image of Melissa as a “majorette” with knives while playing part of the parade… And a well-characterised rival-in-romance, Danny, for Paul to contend with. All of them (except Lewis?) are ’children’ of this novel but, soon, perhaps, to become ‘orphans’ once we close the book-depository for good. Except as an ebook there may be different powers of life-after-fiction….probably too early in the history of this new ‘printing-press’ revolution to judge. As if from ‘Twin Peaks’ to ‘Lost’, we now reach some pulley-hangar of “sawhorses“ called Screwpine in the woods… An “uneasy peace” as I make a Proustian cup of tea and a poutine sandwich before resumption of reading. But not before mentioning a certain idol-like sculpture of an owl… [One of Kellen's pavones now become Ted's rock-thing?] (6 Apr 12 – 1.45 pm bst)
From “I don’t know the beginning” to “‘Nothing here is really yours.’”
“‘So I just decided you might ought to put this place in your tourbook. Even if it’s not really a place anymore. Just in case one day … I don’t know.’”
And at Screwpine we reach some major plot hub that is susceptible, no doubt, to despoiling-by-review. Which I don’t intend to do. Suffice to say that, although I have been on various audit-trails with my Hirshberg reading-orgy of the last few weeks, I think I have reached a goal that somehow I knew I would reach: “‘A real Reconstruction.’” Not a parallel world. Not a Paul Dent, our protagonist, as Winston Smith, not even as a Big Brother manqué or some Wizard of Oz behind the controls, but certainly as a force even more powerful perhaps than the Lewis figure who dogs him. This Screwpine ‘hub’ and its ‘story’ seems to be a stunning geomantic vision that effectively stems from all the ‘points’ and inter-connections that each reader should discover for him- or herself heretofore, i.e. a different set of such spokes of the millwell-wheel for each reader, but always reaching some significant hub where we all arrive eventually in some Lost-type base with contraptions to tweak and dormitories of bunk-beds. And the possible arrival of a ‘Key’ writing-figure as an even bigger catalyst than any of us? The only way, perhaps, indeed, to review or simply discuss this ”Book of Bunk” is by some method of real-time mini-reviews written and imparted whenever we ‘choose’ breaks for sectioning or triangulating the text by the ‘Godgiven’ foibles and accidents of life and by the time-spans available for our creative reading amid all those other pressures of existence. We all do this naturally when reading any book but do we then cohere the cumulative piecemeal reactions that we find ourselves feeling? Do we aim for a single sweeping review after we’ve finished the book or for something far more special that only special books can summon or instil in us even beyond our own perceived ability to achieve? I hereby inaugurate, at this junction of the tracks, the Global Real-Time Reviewing Project. More of this later. Meanwhile, of course, I may not have reached this book’s ‘hub’ at all, having so far only read about 60% of the text. I do wish ebooks had page numbers! (6 Apr 12 – 4.35 pm bst)
From “…ever heard her say anything cruel” to “…and child at every table off the patio.”
“…cataloguing the various County stories in her head, knitting them into a nearly cohesive, all-inclusive imaginary history.”
[Today would have been the birthday of my beloved grandmother (Alice): born 1899]. There is a sense of Alice in Wonderland in this reading-section; plus a sense of the private-gathering from Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’; and a touch of the Mia Farrow film ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ (its frighteningly converging ‘in-character’ finale) with Paul Dent as a version of a Rosemary made pregnant, as it were, with the gestation of ’story’ now come-to-term. This is extraordinary material, skilfully balanced between the ludicrous and the believable. ”…he sported a tan trilby with a lilac in its band.” [I have a bodily ailment at the moment. If it gets worse, I may not be back here for a while. If it gets better, see you tomorrow]. (6 Apr 12 – 7.55 pm bst)
From “The one notable exception” to “Even the ones you supposedly loved.”
“…playing out your endless power games, that you managed to trample everyone else.”
[Feeling a bit better today, touch Trampleton elm-wood. 
] — This is one Hell of a book. Teasing me just as vigorously as I am teasing it. Or teasing him, that Lewis bloke playing the ‘endless power games’. Now incrementally an authority figure (following a Mayoral election plotted in the Chestnut Garden (cf David Cameron’s Rose Garden appearance with Nick Clegg), an election, no doubt, similar to the very strange Mayoral election going on at this very moment between Ken Livingstone & Boris Johnson in an increasingly Olymp-mythic London), not black and/or white (literally as well as figuratively), allowing us to be embroiled in creating Paul Dent the new Winston Smith: who is in fact, obversely, creating us in return? Lewis and Paul: symbiotic? But who the host and who the parasite in such a (mis-)synergy? And a Revolution: an essential miscegenate Revolution from the ultimate role-playing about the American Civil War in artistic Struwwelpeter-Screwpine retrospect for which only reading the previous Hirshberg books that I’ve recently experienced for the first time can fully prepare you. All of this, for me, ties in very well with things in my long on-going philosophy (things, as a Hawler, I’ve often droned on about on-line for many years) about ‘Fiction as Religion’ and ‘”Magic Fiction” as opposed to Magic Realism’ and the ‘Synchronised Shards of Random Truth and Fiction’, and ‘Hawling’ (cf the pulley depot in the Bunk book earlier) and 'Nemonymity' etc etc (please google these terms, if you wish.) This is a major event for me, my reading this book. As it will be for you, I hope, even without the need for you to philosophise about its Creative Aesthetics! It is a SF Fantasy masquerading as a Literary Masterpiece of an Alternate World skewed Mainstream in turn masquerading as Zola-esque Naturalism as if written by Scott Fitzgerald! But we’re not finished yet. Things could still change. (7 Apr 12 – 9.40 am bst)
From “Lewis ate another cookie” to “At least here, the fights people lose are fights they choose themselves.”
“This is still the Depression, little brother. There are all kinds of people appearing out of nowhere and reestablishing themselves.”
In the 1950s and 1960s there was a regular BBC TV show very popular in the UK that I used to watch: ‘The Black & White Minstrel Show”: white men blacked themselves up and then danced and sang songs with white women. During the 1970s it was stopped after a few years of fading out of popularity, ostensibly with a growing distaste for such entertainment because of ‘political correctness’. Were Realities themselves changing piecemeal or were people’s self-projections of Realities actually changing those Realities for real? “By the time I got clear, a new tableau had formed.” Teddy Anklebones or Timmy Funnybones? Blackmail or a black book called the Bible? Via this Bunk book’s perspective from various rail-rideable Tracks of Time (including a brief fast-forward visit to 1953), we sense now perhaps a serious underpinning of Realities by justifiable means (and ends) of intrinsic human(e) strength as a derivation of the actual endemic frailty shown by our human bodies’ temptations and illnesses that infect our minds as well as the bodies themselves: spurring us to perform humanity better: i.e. by substantive use of ‘believed’ dreams rather than of those Realities so unworthy of any belief (or simply incapable of provoking such belief). ”By now the trees themselves seemed to be buzzing.” (7 Apr 12 – 1.35 pm bst)
From “‘Wait,’ Lewis said” to “whining ass all the way to Oklahoma.”
“; she spent her time dreaming that everyone else was different, while she stayed the same.”
Everyone got their own story wrong? The voting was rigged? The voting was prematurely closed? Ruth or Roth or Brother: this story takes on a ‘Peyton Place’ soap-opera before boarding an ”orphan train” in the direction of Mayhem… But whom do they leave on the platform? Paul, Lewis, Grace, Scott, Glen…? This plot is like juggling knives in a circus. (7 Apr 12 – 2.55 pm bst)
From “Robert doubled over” to “THE END”
“Yours was the key piece.”
…as Lewis says to Paul in one of this book’s time zone experiences that remind me of the journeys to familiar yet unfamiliar places made during “11/22/63″, barbershops et al. And here McCarthy, as I astutely (!) predicted earlier, despite the lack of history in my knowledge. But of those left on the platform just listed by me above, only one of them actually has ‘Key’ embedded in their real names. Reading this book was like its own bonfire game, jumping through it with the foolhardiest aplomb, taking the risk more riskily time and time and again, and that very thought of mine somehow encapsulates this finale of that aforementioned Mayhem journey on the Orphan Train: “Why can’t I get one single person to just tell me what in blazes happened out there?” Indeed the Key is not the only Lost City: or a Country or a Humanity to bolster from its very frailty. One day there will be “no lamplighters“, except for each and everyone of us who has read this book. That ‘Secret Europe’ book I mentioned earlier, too, and its concomitant concoctions of substantive geography et al … where “I made notes in the margin and moved on.” Something I can’t do with this Book of Bunk. (7 Apr 12 – 4.00 pm bst)
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