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)
I
first came across Ben Marcus with The Age of Wire and String, a sort of
verbal photon-gun taking potshots at pretty much anything in sight, stripping
the targets of their coating of familiarity. With The Flame Alphabet, Marcus seems to be taking a
stride towards a more conventional novel (plot! characters!) but it’s largely in
order to tread down the comforting ‘givens’ of fiction. In this book, language
itself has become toxic, especially the speech of children to their parents, and
Sam and Claire must decide whether to stay with the teenage daughter who is
causing them harm or to abandon her and flee to a quarantine centre. With its
literalised metaphors, detailed descriptions of implausible equipment and swoops
of idiotic speculation that debouche more and more meaning the sillier they get,
The Flame Alphabet is the kind of book Flann O’Brien and Richard
Brautigan might have written if they had got together to write a science fiction
novel without ever having read one.
(June 2013)
