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White Apples by Jonathan Carroll check out website: www.tor.com and www.jonathancarroll.com
There is magic and, in many people's perceptions, humanoids with pointy ears. Tolkien has a lot to answer for. Jonathan Carroll writes fantasy of a very different order. The quests within it are often personal and inward looking. Set in the contemporary world, they are best described as bizarre or surreal. He challenges perceptions. At the start of 'White Apples' we meet philanderer Vincent Ettrich.
His latest girlfriend is Coco, the owner of a shop selling sexy lingerie. Everything seems ordinary, almost mundane. In the middle of a meal out with her, he gets a phone call from his ex-wife, telling him that his colleague, Bruno Mann, has dropped dead of a heart attack. While the conversation is going on, Ettrich can see Bruno having a confrontation with his date. In bed later, he discovered Bruno Mann's name tattooed on Coco's neck. It is then that Coco tells Ettrich that he is dead. He died of liver cancer three months after he had asked his previous girlfriend, Isabelle Neukor, to marry him and she had turned down his proposal. The problem is he cannot remember anything about that time and neither can anyone else. It seems that everyone's memories have been adjusted. Then Isabelle comes back into his world. She is pregnant with his son and it is she that brought him back from death. Their son will be important in the fight against chaos and he will need both parents to guide him. Against them is an agent of chaos. The novel can be taken at face value as thought-provoking fantasy set in a present day where most people are unaware of anything unusual occurring or the events could be interpreted as delusion. We are also treated to the idea that the universe is a mosaic made up of the lives of people. At the same time, our lives are mosaics which we arrange to our satisfaction. After death, we become part of the great mosaic that is 'god'. If chaos wins, the tesserae of lives will not adhere and underlying fabric will disintegrate. The suggestion is that each of the choices we make influences the pattern of the whole. Sometimes, some pieces like Ettrich and Isabelle, have more importance in the overall pattern than others. Jonathan Carroll's work walks the tightrope between genre and mainstream fiction and will find aficionados in both. At the same time, there will be fantasy readers who will not appreciate the subtlety and the imagination that has gone into creating this world that resembles our but slightly out of kilter. There are fabulous set pieces within the novel, full of small details that bring the characters to life even though their role is fleeting. One example is when Bruno is sent to see the King of the Park, an experience he is not relishing. The address is a barber's shop, seemingly ordinary, but the men waiting there are painted clearly and given life in few words. Ultimately, with the exception of these scenes, it is a quiet, reflective book and it is easy to forget it once you have moved on to something else. Perhaps this is an advantage. It can be re-read with as much pleasure as the first time. Like a good bath, it is enjoyable to be immersed in the prose and soak up the ambience. Pauline Morgan
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OTHER REVIEWS - June 2004
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Too
often the term 'fantasy' evokes images of strange worlds resembling
clean, non-smelly mediaeval landscapes with lots of people riding
horses and waving swords around.
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