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Saturday, March 19, 2011

WHY ONLY THE PROLOGUE TO "GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA"?


Some readers have questioned my publishing the Prologue of A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA with no scheduled planning date for publication. 
Quite frankly, I don’t even know if the manuscript will be published. 
I apologize for this if it seemed crass, but I am often asked about the book, and thought this brief introduction to it would suffice.  Given this interest, I will attempt to explain the scope of the book here.
It is a parody on our secular society that has lost its spiritual way, and therefore its moral compass, while being preoccupied with the pornography of the body at the expense of pornography of the spirit and will.  The great betrayal is love has been locked out.
The novel is true but fictionalized to protect the guilty.  It is set in South Africa at a time of the cruelty, illegitimacy and terror the policy of apartheid, where the 20 percent white population dominated with draconian zeal the 80 percent black population.
The mockery of Christianity is on display with the principal religion of the minority white population (Afrikaners and Brits) that of the Dutch Reform Church and the Church of England in support of the Afrikaner policy of apartheid, while the Roman Catholic Church acquiesced in that same support. 
The story follows the exploits of the protagonist, Seamus “Dirk” Devlin, and his family as they engage South Africa in 1968 at the height of the apartheid policy.  This marked, in my view, the end of the twentieth century.
The world, and in particular the United States commenced to change radically in its descent in 1968 into the present.  Lance Morrow wrote in Time (January 11, 1988), "1968 like a knife blade severed the past from the future."
Devlin is a young idealistic lower class American, and first generation college graduate in his family, who has found his anchor in Irish Catholicism, only to find it grumbling to dust, who believed in the American corporate society only to discover its duplicitous agenda exploiting  the weak across the globe in the post-World War Two era, who believed in society’s institutions such as marriage and education only to find he was not prepared for a world bent on self-alienation and creative destruction of the environment.
The book opens, as you have read, with him retiring at only 31 as life and the pursuit of happiness no longer make any sense to him. 
He says to the priest in the confessional, “Bless be Father for I am bored.”  And then he tells his story, which is a declaration of the pointlessness of a life of meaningless success.
This is the story of a lower class kid who has risen to mahogany role and its rarefied counterfeit world, only to find it wanting, and then quitting as his career and future appar to be soaring.
Someone wrote, why “boring” as a metaphor for the story?  Is it meaningful to the story?
That, of course, is for the reader to decide. 
I can tell you this, the so-called “seven deadly sins” had nothing to do with Jesus or the bible, but were a product, not of St. Augustine as many think, as they are a product of the mind of a 4th century monk named Evagrius Ponticus .  Actually, Ponticus authored “eight deadly sins,” which is germane to the book.
What was the eighth deadly sin?  He called it “acedia,” or boredom. 
Boredom can be characterized as apathy, passivity, compliance, failure to take a stand, saying “shit happens,” or “life is a bitch and then you die,” all favorite expressions of boredom in the present age
I have been writing about this malaise in nonfiction for the past thirty plus years without much impact. 
I’ve turned to the novel because the few readers who read books generally read fiction more than nonfiction. 
Should the book be published, many who have read me before will most likely burn the book once they start reading bercause of their conservative or traditional orientation.  I share this with you because it is likely for them to find the book offensive.  The book doesn't spare anyone including the protagonist and his family. 
A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA is a book that might have a better audience fifty or a hundred years from now when historians have a better read on our duplicitous and hypocritical society. 
We all live in the cage of our cognitive biases, and we tend to think the problem is with other people not ourselves.  We don't like to think, to process information in view of its content and context against the reality of experience, but to fall back on common held views that are a function of societal bias.
We look for bromides, for anchors in religion, education, home, family, ethnicity and in our social connections.  The book suggests these have all betrayed us.
Ergo, the book is about the systemic failure of our system and our culture.  It suggests the only sensible action in a world of failure is retreat, reflection and regeneration.
The book ends with the young man cut off from the world that programmed and molded him into the person he no longer chooses to be. 
In a real sense, the book is a continuation of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, which ends in 1947.
A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA skips twenty-one years, bypassing high school and college with only background references to those pyrotechnical years, while concentrating on 1968, a metaphorical year of crashing, burning and epiphany.
It took me forty-three years to complete this second part of a trilogy.  Since I am in the afternoon of my senior years, it is doubtful if the third part will be completed, which has already been started. 
Were I to describe these three efforts in a single word it would be:
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE – INNOCENCE
A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA – BETRAYAL
DELIVERANCE FROM ALL EVIL – LOVE
It may seem that I procrastinate, but that would not at all be true.  I quote a story from Krishnamurti in the book, where a painter sets up his easel and collapsible chair, sits down, takes out his paints, and then studies a tree. 
He does this for days, when a man who has observed him is finally provoked to say, "You come here every day, set up to paint but never paint, why is that?"
The painter answers simply, "I will pain when I become the tree and the tree becomes me."
As a writer of this book, I can relate to that.
Finally, some of my readers are atheists and of other persuasions of human behavior.  I respect them if I fail to understand them and their passions.  We are all children of God even if the God we believe in is a scientific equation.
Be always well,
Jim

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