A Son of the Rock

Morrigan, 1988, 176 p.

How do you describe the indescribable? This is Lafferty in all his bonkers glory.

The novel starts with a focus on one Atrox Fabulinus’s “one hundred and one tests to tell whether you’re dreaming” and in chapters one to three we are also introduced, by way of lists, to the Group of Twelve (who actually number fifteen.) Fabulinus (the Roman Rabelais) is one of the seven giants who scribble the world into being and also one of the pillars on whom the world rests. The twelve decide they are. (Dreaming, that is.) “To be real is to be unique. To be unreal is to be common. There is only one chance in all infinity of it (the world) being real. But there are a billion billion and ongoing billions of chances of it being unreal.”

Along with Fabulinus the Group of Twelve comprises Hilary Ardri, Jane Chantal Ardri, Leo Parisi, Perpetua Parisi, Gorgonius Pantera, Monika Pantera, John Barkley Towntower, Solomon Izzersted, Denis Lollardy, Caesar Oceano, Laughter-Lynn Casement, Mary Brandy Manx, Hieronymous Talking-Crow, Countess Maude Grogley. (Some of them are spares.) To call them characters would be to stretch the word beyond breaking point. You don’t read Lafferty for characters. Nor for plot – though there is one; involving the murders of successive members of the group and of others’ elevation to Scribbling Giant. They also roam the world day to day (chapter by chapter) taking in Frisia, Dublin (East of Laughter is apparently Lastoir de Gaire in Dublin,) East Sussex, the Isle of Man, Lecco in Italy and a castle in Germany. And there are eight days in the week for some and nine days – the ninth slotted into gaps in the other days – for a select few.

To give a flavour of the writing a (partially shortened) piece of dialogue runs, “Yes, to all appearances the atoms are empty boxes….. They lack detail…. They contain only rough schematics of even rougher schematics..” This situation is then compared to buying an expensive car and receiving only a child’s drawing of a car. The dialogue continues, “But this isn’t the way I remember them! I remember them as totally detailed…. Great God of the Atoms, you have short-changed me! Oh mend your ways! The atoms of the apparent universe are completely unworthy of you.”

Pedant’s Corner:- Skirried? Past tense of skirr? That ought to be skirred surely? Apparently skirried is in a Thackeray story. Aquafer, titonium.