EXCHANGES BETWEEN THE AUTHOR AND A READER ABOUT THE NOVEL: A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA

EXCHANGES BETWEEN THE AUTHOR AND A READER ABOUT THE NOVEL:

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA

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

© April 16, 2014

 

READER:

I am reading A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA.  Many distractions, in and out all day, finally warm enough for a sweatshirt instead of three layers, so gardening possible.  Found a hawk of some kind dead under the triple white pines, such beautifully mottled feathers, head and beak in good shape.  I won’t touch it because it is protected.  I am at a loss as to how it came to die there.  Appears no stress like from a battle, so curious the cause of its demise.

My review of GREEN ISLAND will go something like this: “For a history and biography reader, just having finished the last volume of Game of Thrones, taking up James Fisher’s A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA provided a riveting experience.  It felt like tumbling down a mountain never knowing where the course was taking you, surely not straight down!  It is a book to be savored not simply read.  It fits no form, coursing akin to pinball.  You are whacked quite suddenly just when you think a course has been set.  For a thought provoking read, I would recommend this revolving door, a book casting you repeatedly beyond an unsettled comfort zone.  A book that the mind returns to repeatedly.  I get the BLACK SEA.”

AUTHOR JAMES RAYMOND FISHER:

Yes, I believe you do “get it.” 

I struggled for forty years to tell the story as it unfolded in my mind.  It started out as therapy in 1969 and progressed as I unraveled my self-deception.  Haslam’s bookstore in St. Petersburg (Florida) became an oasis that I frequented nearly every day.  It is where I was introduced to Krishnamurti, and his personal brand of mysticism, and Alan W. Watts, and his outrageous blending of Eastern and Western philosophy. 

Religion had failed me or I had failed religion.  I wasn’t sure.  So, I read on Catholicism, Protestantism, Islamism, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism.  I found Buddhism the sanest of the lot.  Books were medicine for my sick soul, a soul that failed to extricate itself from South Africa although I was no longer in South Africa.

It is perceptive of you to sense South Africa was like riding a roller coaster, or falling off a mountain, only to reappear on another before you could sense the danger.  It was like that for me. 

The people of the story are real, as real as life itself.  Sad as one reader found its lack of redeeming characters, they all vibrate with sine qua non exuberance.  Alas, there are no really good or bad people, only people largely on automatic pilot doing the best they can to survive until the next day.

There is the Bantu Daniel, who is Devlin’s driver; Josiah, his Bantu gardener and “friend”; Asabi, the Devlins' Bantu maid; Gabriel, the Devlins' Bantu chef and house manager; the outrageously honest and erotic Afrikaner Nina, who was Devlin’s teacher, muse and god, as she was able to penetrate the tinsel façade of his propriety American society and culture. 

There was the Matthews brothers, managing director and regional director of Polychem’s subsidiary, Devlin’s employer.  There was also Frieda, the transplanted German, who was the MD'a secretary, as well as the predatory and sensuous Heather Matthews, the managing director’s wife, while Birgitte Matthews, the regional director’s wife, represented the British leisure class with a seductive fragility that Devlin found intoxicating. 

This and assorted others, British, Bantu and Afrikaner, along with a few Americans provided the metaphorical montage of a time and place and space that vibrated with uncontrolled excess, a green island in a black sea.  It was a play within a play, as the world was having a nervous breakdown at the precise moment that Devlin and South Africa were having theirs.

GREEN ISLAND also profiles the Roman Catholic Church in South Africa during apartheid with something akin to the political schizophrenia that Pope Pius XII showed toward Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

Seamus “Dirk” Devlin is in the center of this vortex, and it is through his nightmarish narrative that the story of deceit, betrayal, and intrigue unfolds.  And yes, the Devlin's narrative is constantly interrupted by his guilty reflections, dreams, introspections, and assessments, many of which suggest his crumbling spirit as he rides his erotic dance into denouement. 

This erotic dance is meant as a metaphor to South Africa in 1968, with nothing spared to show it as if on camera.

Devlin’s constant spiritual companions are such travelers as Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Schopenhauer, and Jesus.   Devlin who doesn’t smoke or drink, and never has, nor does he swear, while expletives are the common language of this contentious place and time. 

If I were to describe the novel in one word, it would be “life.”

THE READER RESPONDS:

I am at a loss as to how to identify your audience.  My sense is that your readers are not honest with themselves, and that their shock value is phony or simply, they choose to be blind.  “Life,” as you put it, IS what we are here for.   My hope is for the day the book is in print, the Kindle market, at present, is narrow.  I must confess I prefer a book in my hand.

How this can come about I don’t know; pray that the book takes off on Kindle, and makes its own market. 

Another snow and blow day here in the middle of April, ugh!  It puts one into pondering what is spring? 

We have lived a long and interesting time, my friend.  That in itself is an accomplishment.  Be well.

 

AUTHOR FISHER RESPONDS:

I’ve just finished Robert Goddard’s “Set in Stone.”  I never started to read novels seriously until I came back from South Africa, first reading the classics and then more popular novelist, but always in an attempt to get their sense of telling a story without inhibition. 

At the University of Iowa, I sandwiched “understanding the American novel,” “understanding American poetry,” “a course on Shakespeare,” between my studies in physics and chemistry, calculus and statistics, as I have always wanted to be a writer.  Largely, in courses with English or humanities majors or graduate students, I only wanted to get a sense of context not content from these detours.  Substance and style were guarded zealously as my proprietary product. 

People compliment me when they say “you don’t write like anyone else I know.”  I don’t want to write like anyone else because no one else has lived my life, or experienced what I have, but they might be able to identify with some aspects of that journey.

The reason I like Goddard is because he writes of loss, always loss, as do I.  Someone wrote me today and said, “You’re one of the very few in the world I know, still alive, that speaks truth out of habit.” 

It is a moving compliment.  I hope the reader gets this sense from A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA, as there are no detours here.

Be always well yourself.

Jim