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Re. Zenith Phase III, Mike; again, I found your online essay a very interesting and often perceptive bit of literary criticism. It's not exactly what I would pick up from this Phase ~ I hadn't noticed the imagery of the vicar impaled on the weathercock, for instance, and you pick up other patterns of recurrent words and visuals along the same lines ~ but to me (again) the cultural connotations are really important. That Hotspur (I always thought) is based on Olivier as Henry V, and so brings with him all the associations of optimistic patriotism in an entirely different war, is key to my understanding that Hotspur's so hopelessly out of his depth as he doesn't even understand the type of cosmic conflict he's involved in. He's a desperately valiant hero, but he's out of Shakespeare via the 1940s. He thinks he's fighting Nazis or infidels, or the French! The awful sense of sadness and doom throughout also stems, for me, from the knowledge that we've got kids like Billy the Cat and Katie, who are used to burglars in a British village, fighting Dark Gods, and Billy Whizz trying to outrun a Lovecraftian horror instead of his dad's slipper. One of the parallels is clearly rooted in the 1940s, and I think that's important in the clash between their eager hope and their utter lack of any chance of survival. Seeing these dated, naive kids' comic characters dropped into a superhero epic on the cusp of the 1990s is a crucial part of the Phase's power, for me. Those cultural references immediately help us understand why Smiley Sun and Domino have more of a fighting chance than Electrogirl ~ the former are hip-hop and goth, the latter's out of Vera Lynn's era. On a simple level, I would have thought it was worth noting that Vertex isn't just a "nicer version" of Zenith, but a yuppie. (Or a Sloane? Hard to remember what we used to call guys like that. Anyway, he drinks Perrier I think). And isn't it significant that Maximan's started talking like Finnegans Wake? (or so it seemed to me).
Anyway, you asked for discussion I think; or maybe you were just asking people to buy your book, but here's some discussion anyway. How have the later chapters changed from these early versions? |
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