Michael Barnes
Premee Mohamed is an author I will always make time to read, though given how prolific a writer she is that posses challenges of their own. I could easily make a to be read ziggurat from her writings.
This award winning novel is a remarkable meditation on war, pacifism and sacrifice. It has to be as much of the tale is of the two characters slow progress across a war torn landscape towards a the flying fortress city of the enemy. Dylan Haston describes it thus "Alefret, radical pacifist imprisoned by the Varkal military, and Qhudur, bloodthirsty internment camp guard. Prior to the novel’s start, Alefret had been imprisoned and held without trial for war crimes: namely, being the de facto leader and author of “The Pact”, a loosely organized pacifist movement. A representative section of the group’s titular Pact reads, “For the preservation of human life, no sacrifice can be too great; we in the Pact will hold it above all else…” Alefret and the other signatories of the Pact were taken into custody after a Varkal bomb backfired and blew up a patch of their own city, taking one of Alefret’s legs with it".
Alefret is an interesting, complicated protagonist: he is an extremely large man (seven feet four) who is viewed as a "freak" and a "monstrosity" by Qhudur and the people in his home village:
So huge, so ugly; look at that face, must be simple, he'll never speak, never read, never think, not really. He'll eat you out of house and home if he lives. And you can forget having in-laws, forget being taken care of when you're older, you'll die alone and penniless, you should never have let him be born. All those things people said to them as Alefret watched. As if he could not understand the words. His parents had never defended him, only nodded, wept, nodded.
He wished he could hate them for it, but even now, with them both dead, he could not; there was only a great bewilderment, because he could speak, and could write, and think, and they dismissed it all, till he himself wondered whether he really could do any of those things or was simply imagining them, locked into a skull as thick as everyone said he had. As thick as a bull's, they said. No room for a brain. And that great misshapen forehead: like horns.
Even when he was older, and had made his living teaching mathematics and geometry and science to the village children, when he had his own school at the family farm, sold his own wool and eggs, even when he purchased his house, the village said: We love you. And in the next breath: You monster.
The pacing is slow, deliberate and so provides plenty of time to meditate on the nature of war. A engaging and deliberate novel.
Premee Mohamed is an author I will always make time to read, though given how prolific a writer she is that posses challenges of their own. I could easily make a to be read ziggurat from her writings.
This award winning novel is a remarkable meditation on war, pacifism and sacrifice. It has to be as much of the tale is of the two characters slow progress across a war torn landscape towards a the flying fortress city of the enemy. Dylan Haston describes it thus "Alefret, radical pacifist imprisoned by the Varkal military, and Qhudur, bloodthirsty internment camp guard. Prior to the novel’s start, Alefret had been imprisoned and held without trial for war crimes: namely, being the de facto leader and author of “The Pact”, a loosely organized pacifist movement. A representative section of the group’s titular Pact reads, “For the preservation of human life, no sacrifice can be too great; we in the Pact will hold it above all else…” Alefret and the other signatories of the Pact were taken into custody after a Varkal bomb backfired and blew up a patch of their own city, taking one of Alefret’s legs with it".
Alefret is an interesting, complicated protagonist: he is an extremely large man (seven feet four) who is viewed as a "freak" and a "monstrosity" by Qhudur and the people in his home village:
So huge, so ugly; look at that face, must be simple, he'll never speak, never read, never think, not really. He'll eat you out of house and home if he lives. And you can forget having in-laws, forget being taken care of when you're older, you'll die alone and penniless, you should never have let him be born. All those things people said to them as Alefret watched. As if he could not understand the words. His parents had never defended him, only nodded, wept, nodded.
He wished he could hate them for it, but even now, with them both dead, he could not; there was only a great bewilderment, because he could speak, and could write, and think, and they dismissed it all, till he himself wondered whether he really could do any of those things or was simply imagining them, locked into a skull as thick as everyone said he had. As thick as a bull's, they said. No room for a brain. And that great misshapen forehead: like horns.
Even when he was older, and had made his living teaching mathematics and geometry and science to the village children, when he had his own school at the family farm, sold his own wool and eggs, even when he purchased his house, the village said: We love you. And in the next breath: You monster.
The pacing is slow, deliberate and so provides plenty of time to meditate on the nature of war. A engaging and deliberate novel.