A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA: WHY SO SEXUALLY EXPLICIT?

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA:

WHY SO SEXUALLY EXPLICIT?

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

© April 24, 2014

Readers of my latest novel, A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA, have commented to me directly by e-mail, and implicitly in the limited reviews on www.amazon.com’s Kindle that they consider the content too explicitly sexual.  

Others have e-mailed me, “Why is the book not in hard copy?”  I’ll try to answer both questions here.

As to the reason it is not in hard copy, the simple answer is, “Nobody would publish it.”  The second question is more difficult to explain, but I’ll try.

Aside from those who find the novel chaotic, which it is supposed to be, given it was a chaotic time, chaotic situation, and there were no redeeming characters in point of fact.  I know because I was there and part of the show.

Others claim, “their sensitivities have been offended,” and still others,” “the sex and tangential detours got in the way of the story.”

These are legitimate criticisms because the book is explicit, it does offend, and the detours could get in the way of the story.  It is not a book to be read only once, as I have found many other books.

The story starts out with the hypersensitive Seamus “Dirk” Devlin, an angry young man and narcissistic to a fault, looking for some place to hang his angst and anger, as he leaves his American comfort zone for the unknown in South Africa.  He is damaged goods and neither he nor anyone else knows this as he assumes this assignment.

Personally, he considers himself a different engineer than his executive colleagues because he reads books, books on everything, books he cannot share with them much less his wife, as none are readers or interested in searching-seeking the meaning of existence while such matters plague his temperament.

His success in the company, at so young an age, is legendary.  The company and its people accept him as different, labeling him as their “token intellectual,” leaving it at that.  He is close to no one, prefers books to people, doesn’t drink or smoke or swear, but knows how to get things done as no one else in the company.

Tall, blond, straight-as-an-arrow, a devout Irish Roman Catholic, he comes to feel his country, his company, his church, and his family have betrayed him with his only anchor his mind and his books to keep him from going totally mad. 

Through his reading, he has found many who have accomplished much but lived in a constant agitated or equally chaotic state – from Lincoln to Dostoyevsky, from Jesus to Freud – functioning well on the operational level if not always successfully on the emotional or person level.

Henry Miller, early in his career, not yet a successful or acclaimed novelist, wrote for a publication that published little green books full of pornographic imaginings.  Miller’s effort was rejected because the salacious detail was buried in the intellectual and abstract so that the normal reader with prurient interests would have little idea what he was driving at.  Miller later admitted he was too self-conscious to write honestly about sex.

Later, he wrote “Tropic of Cancer” (1934) and “Tropic of Capricorn” (1939), books I read with a red face.  After reading them, I went to confession feeling I had sinned in my heart.  Although a father of two, and in my early twenties, having left the comfort of the Research and Development Lab of Standard Brands, Inc. for working as a chemical sales engineer, I was introduced to my artistic side that I never knew existed.   

Nearly sixty years later, and forty years after experiencing South Africa during the era of apartheid, I finally wrote A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA that is reminiscent of that initial experience.

Like these two works of Henry Miller, my novel involves social criticism (apartheid and Irish Roman Catholic politics), philosophical reflections (ostentatious Catholicism and the simplicity of Jesus), explicit language (I’ve always had an ear for what people say as if a recorder in my head), sex (explicit, too, without camouflage), surrealistic free association (Devlin often dreams while awake, for sample, seeing the Bantu natives naked as they serve a seven-course dinner), mystical (a cavalcade of players provides this introspective), and always, about the author’s real life only written as fiction.

We can watch the gore on CSI or the Follower on television, or the terrible things people are doing to each other about the world on television in living color, and yet we have much more trouble with people exploring each other’s bodies and souls in print than these images of mayhem.

As an author, I can find no justification for this other than fear, fear of embracing our human nature, fear of seeing what comedic creatures we all are, and fear that we might not be special compared to other animals on this planet.  

Were I never to have had the experience of South Africa during apartheid, were I not to have had my gardener murdered on my estate, were I not to have seen the Catholic Church backpedal in the wake of green card imprisonments for Bantus not having these papers on their person or up to date, were I not to have discovered the rogue and rascal side of my nature, chances are I would be equally contemptuous of the audacity to write such a book as A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA.  But I did see South Africa naked and myself as well, and my penance has been my life, which is the last sentence of the novel.