Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2023‎ (177)

For a few years now, I have been trying to write in a style that is more economical and more direct. And there’s a reason for that: the characters. My characters are direct and objective. They live lives free of subterfuge, without much choice, focusing just on what needs to be done. A construction of drawn-out reflexions filled with digressions would be out of place in a story where these characters are the centre.
And I think the brutalism of the book lies in the raw construction of the characters. Their fears, their intentions and their actions are apparent. There is no coating, no glossing that can hide who they really are. You understand who they are and what they are capable of.

Fire reproduces in fire, and what keeps it alive is oxygen, the same thing that keeps man alive. Without oxygen a fire will self-extinguish, and ma

Fire reproduces in fire, and what keeps it alive is oxygen, the same thing that keeps man alive. Without oxygen a fire will self-extinguish, and man too. Like man, fire needs to nourish itself to keep burning. It voraciously devours everything around.
Suffocate a man, and he'll die because he's unable to breathe.
Smother a flame, and it also dies.

Flames stay ablaze as they burn through wood, a mattress, or curtains, among other flammable products. Human beings are flammable products, too, that will keep a fire creeping for a long time. They survive on the same principle, and when they're facing off, they want to destroy each other, to devour one another.
Since man discovered fire, he has tried to dominate it. But fire won't ever be dominated.

The planet is finite and transitory. As the space to store trash dwindles, so too does the space to inhume bodies. Some decades or centuries from now there'll be more bodies beneath the earth than on it. We'll be stepping on our ancestors, neighbors, relatives, and enemies, like we step on dry grass: without even noticing it. Ground soil and water will be contaminated with leachate, liquid containing toxic substances that drains from bodies in decomposition. Death has the power to generate death.

In spite of a certain melancholy that comes over him when he thinks of the incinerated, Ronivon knows that asepsis is best achieved by setting mortal remains on fire. Otherwise to think of the end of the world is to think of mountains of dross and the earth soaked through with the inhumed.

A fighting dog is a dog that has no choice. He learned what his owner chose to teach him ever since he was a puppy. He's recognizable by his short

A fighting dog is a dog that has no choice. He learned what his owner chose to teach him ever since he was a puppy. He's recognizable by his short or amputated ears, scars, stitches, and lacerations. He's had no choices in life. That's exactly how it's been for Edgar Wilson who was trained at a young age to kill rabbits and frogs. He has some scars beneath his arms, and on his neck and chest. There are so many lines and sutures on his skin he doesn't remember where he got half of them. However, scars of violence and resistance to death on other animals have never dulled the glint in his eye while he contemplates a big sky. Night and day, he spends a good deal of time looking up. Maybe he expects something to happen in the sky or with the sky.. maybe he'd like to cut up some clouds with his big knife.

Despite having been raised like a fighting dog, he knows it's better than being a pig. That's because pigs can't look up at the sky. They just can't. Anatomically, pigs were made basically to look at the ground and to feed on whatever they found there.
Edgar knows that he's a fighting dog raised to kill pigs, rabbits, and men. However, every bit of a pig is relished. Rabbits can be eaten with green olives and almonds. Men are often given a mass. As an excuse to light a candle and pray.

Sad days can be cold or hot, gray or blue. And shadows contour souls, desires, and thoughts. These shadows belong to no one, they can come from anywhere: from a wall nearby, an ocean wave, an expanded wing in the sky. Sometimes, even the stars seem to make shadows. Though they're dead, they overshadow with their insistent glimpse of infinity. And in thinking of stars, sometimes he wishes for a stairway to the sky. So he can blow them out.

In all of this, I’ve talked a lot of death. Animals sent to the fat, culled and slurried, blood enough to float a gunboat. But before Simply Red, I

In all of this, I’ve talked a lot of death. Animals sent to the fat, culled and slurried, blood enough to float a gunboat. But before Simply Red, I’d never seen a dead body before, y’know, a dead fella. Come close. Warehouse in Shropshire, a bloke’s knees rolled flatter than oats under fifty tonne of rig.

Because I’m a shepherd and if that’s not an answer, well, I tell you how it is. You’re born in a field with nowt but a fire for company, one that about keeps you hot, and you don’t know where it came from or how you got in the field or how to start another fire, but you know how to keep it going. And the one thing you do know for sure – if you don’t feed it, that fire’s going out and you don’t want to be the one to let it.

For years Hew and I debated what had happened to me, politically, during that year at the Institute. Hew liked to tease me about what he called my

For years Hew and I debated what had happened to me, politically, during that year at the Institute. Hew liked to tease me about what he called my Libertarian Interregnum. But what I actually had, I posited, were Schrödinger’s politics—a complement to Schrödinger’s marriage and Schrödinger’s affair. When I wasn’t looking, I barely had politics at all—I had always been this way. When I did have to look, when I had to identify my position, my politics depended on the precise question presented and the point of observation. This is different from apathy, I think. There is strong science supporting the idea that I am not the only human being who is reactive and irrational in this way; that I am not alone in having moral intuitions that are little more than, well, intuitions—and one would never expect intuitions to be immune to circumstance or to hold the logic of a cohesive system.

In the meantime, he needed distraction. Online. It was absence, yes, but also so engaging. The internet was like a climbing wall. It was stressful and required contorted human postures, and you learned as you did it. It was implicit in participation that the goal was to find higher and firmer footing. Hew loved finding the creative, strong, dexterous arguments that situated someone where others wished to be. He was an absolute sucker for this contest. One time while bickering about how phone-bound he was, I had called Hew a Web Supremacist, to which he said mea culpa.

Nicky drove without hope, burning through an anxious and dwindling sense of compulsion. The countryside was huge and quiet and empty, and for every road she took, she had to forgo a dozen others, all those byways and back roads that digressed for miles into further orders of rural obscurity. Doll was lost and she needed to find him but the countryside wasn't giving her anything; the countryside was holding its tongue and steadfastly averting its gaze as she travelled towards the unending low horizon and the indistinct serrations of the distant mountain ranges, the wide-open fields flipping by like the row of blank pages at the end of a book after the story was over.