A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA -- COMMENTS OF TWO READERS

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA – COMMENTS OF TWO READERS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 19, 2012

READERS WRITE:

Jim,

I have finished your book and have had some trouble forming my thoughts. 

I definitely enjoyed the inter play with your household staff, the exchange with the lady at the train station, and your sales retreat sections.  It gave me a better understanding of what and with whom you were dealing. 

As I have said before, I think the book needs to be shortened and my suggestion would be in the area of the detailed and explicit sexual encounters. 

I do understand where you are coming from but a casual reader might not necessarily have the same insight.  Reading the January 16 issue of Time Magazine and finding the article “How the ANC Lost its Way,” I concluded that not much has changed since you left South Africa. 

You are truly an outstanding individual who is able to reveal, express, and share your most inner self, a respected friend for 70 years.   

Bill

*     *     *

Jim,

I, too, have finished the manuscript and found the book enlightening about the area, the times, the conflicts within the country and within the main characters. 

It is a good story.  There are so many issues that have stayed with me and made me want to learn more. 

I plan to reread it again as I mentioned before.  This time stopping and reflecting on the references knowing it will lead to another level of understanding. 

We both, Bill and I, appreciate and admire your skill and ability and thank you for giving us the opportunity to read and comment on your project. 

We wish you well knowing it is truly a labor of love.

Our best to you and BB.   

Mary       

*     *     *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Billy and Mary,

Thank you.  You are the only ones who have completed the manuscript, and for that I owe you a debt of gratitude.

For my readers, I should mention you are husband and wife.  I have known Billy almost all my life.  Mary I have known only a few years.

Billy and I grew up only doors from each other, went to high school together, took the same classes which included four years of mathematics, four years of English, two years of history, along with a year of physics and chemistry, psychology and social science, two years of Latin, and four years playing football and running track together

We were first students and second athletes.  The course of study we took had no special name such as “college prep” or “advanced placement.”  We gravitated to such studies because of interest, and represented about 10 percent of our class.  Most of us, quite remarkably, graduated from college and pursued successful careers. 

We came out of the middle of the United States, growing up in the middle of the twentieth century, living in the middle of a community along the Mississippi River on the crescent of the State of Iowa, a state then and still with a rate of literacy of 99 percent, a state never caught up in the economic bubble of 2008 with an unemployment rate of around 5 percent today against a national average of 8.5 percent or more. 

The world we were born into was in the middle of the Great Depression.  We were in our adolescent years during World War Two when we went from deprivation of circumstances (Great Depression), to national rationing (WWII), to taking our places in life knowing the reality of scarcity, believing in the equality of opportunity, and the wisdom of frugality.  This was the character of our collective soul.  We were also white. 

As a writer, I admit to being more comfortable as an essayist and cultural critic than a novelist.  That said I took the character of Dirk Devlin, the protagonist of the story, into an alien culture as a young man because his knowledge and expertise had relevance. 

It was 1968, a year I believe marked the end of the twentieth century a little early.  It also marked the year America’s hegemony was starting to assert itself a score of years after World War Two.  Devlin was right in the middle of this surge.

This young naïve engineer was stepping into the collapsing decadence of British colonialism, and into the defiant and misguided policy of apartheid of the Afrikaner government.  Paradoxically, the Afrikaner culture was similar to his Iowa experience.  If this was not challenging enough, he was stepping into a caldron of nature where the artificial rules and taboos of his conditioning had no purchase with its laws.

This “point counterpoint” rhapsody plays on his conscience, and not too far a field from that great novel by Aldous Huxley of the same name. 

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA references this musical technique of counterpoint as the story is constructed after the fashion of a work of music.

Instead of an obvious single plot, there are a number of interlinked storylines and recurring themes to display the characters, and to illustrate such things as corporate hegemony, Bantu multiculturalism, colonialism, Afrikaner isolationism, the soul of race, (Afrikaner and Bantu), the contretemps of clueless hedonism (the British), the disconnect between religion (Catholicism) and morality, the naked turmoil of loveless marriages, the divine rights of executive husbands and the feudalistic dependence of their spouses.

Yes, it is earthy, and earthy without apologies because it is the earthiness in the novel that is real while everything else are shards of shifting and collapsing artifacts of synthetic construction; translated: modernity on display. 

The protagonists are meant to carry the weight of this novel in point counterpoint.  This is revealed as Dirk’s subconscious periodically surfaces with insights and small epiphanies producing music and sometimes only white noise.

My concern is if Seamus “Dirk” Devlin at “point” and Nina van Polanen Petal at “counterpoint” succeed in carrying the story, or does the deluge within the frame of the story overwhelm them and the reader? 

Mary, I would be interested in learning this from you upon your rereading the manuscript.

Your comment that the story can be read on several levels is encouraging, as that is my intention. 

As for you, Billy, I am often told that my writing could use serious editing, and that may include the earthy parts.  But I must confess, were I to have an editor, which I do not have, I doubt seriously if I could be persuaded to excise any of these parts.  You must remember I come from the same tree as James Joyce, the author of ULYSSES. 

Thank you again, and always be well,

Jim