'The Age of Wire and String' by Ben Marcus, illustrated by Catrin Morgan

This book is a sort of fictional encyclopedia of pretty much everything you don't understand about the world but were unable quite to pinpoint and about which you are unable even to find the right sort of words to express your confusion. Familiar things and their meanings have been separated and allowed to settle in new patterns of association, clotted together by the adhesive properties of language, giving rise to new science, new culture, new emotions. Marcus is set against the deadening effect of familiarity; really, his Age of Wire and String is no more savage, tender and surprising than the world we take for granted every day: the problems he describes are the very same ones that already throng the skin dividing our internal world from our external (a concept demonstrably arbitrary and invertible) but to which we have become numbed and unobservant. This book will certainly not help you to understand anything any better, but it will make your confusion immaculate and add to it dimensions of awe and beauty that you had hitherto not suspected. This new edition pairs Marcus's text with Morgan's equally obtuse and intriguing illustrations.

(February 2015)