In the Village of the Immortals, reality is having a nervous breakdown. Wyatt has spied the drowsy planet Rictus Minor. An abandoned railway station, discovered by the manic surveyor Quirke, becomes a crack in eternity. Meanwhile, Corcoran is dabbling with mental fire, and Walshe's bassoon is playing itself. When the voluptuous archangel de Coote arrives to hand out instant ecstasy, Starkey -- the maestro of oneiric engineering -- detects the onset of terminal entropy. But Starkey has been secretly overhauling this exhausted reality and a miraculous metamorphosis is about to take place.
With its cast of extraordinary characters, Starkey is an extravagant comic parable of human folly in the Irish baroque tradition. It reads like a gentle, youthful daydream, which conjures the astonishment, deference and bewilderment that all thinking people experience in their early encounters with the ostensibly rational adult world. As we ourselves mature and take on a role in that world, should we simply ignore its posturing shiftiness and superficiality, or does its persistent, tragic frivolity become a kind of Muzak that comforts us in the elevator of our own rising adulthood?
ISBN 1-84045-110-6
"This novel certainly left an impression on me. The world of The Village and the Immortals is fantastically well realised. Indeed it's been some time since I have entered into a fictional world that so confidently and dismissively transcends realistic conventions."
Lee Brackstone, Faber & Faber
"I was swept away by the cornucopia of the writer's imagination, his intoxicating use of words. Almost every page teems with passages worthy of quotation. The rich extravagance of the narrative, the ease with which every perception of the characters' senses is transformed into words rather than translated by them, place this book amongst the classics. Both subject and style are riveting and show the author to be a major literary talent."
Rayne Arnaud, author of 'The Paternoster Bead' |
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