A terrorist bomb not only killed its victims, but forced a violent rift through time and space, and ruptured the logic that held the world together.
The writer’s task is to invent the reality.
In the talcum on the floor around him he could see the imprints of his mother’s feet. She had moved from side to side, propelled by an over-eager partner, perhaps one of the Japanese officers to whom she was teaching to tango. Jim tried out the dance steps himself, which seemed far more violent than any tango he had ever seen, and managed to fall and cut his hand on the broken mirror.
Looking up at the endless tiers of balconies, he felt uneasily like a visitor to a malevolent zoo where terraces of vertically mounted cages contained creatures of random and ferocious cruelty.
However, for all his affection and loyalty towards the animal, the dog would soon be leaving him – they would both be present at a celebratory dinner when they reached the roof, he reflected with a touch of gallows-humour, but the poodle would be in the pot.
She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was.
Work dominates life in Eden-Olympia, and drives out everything else. The dream of a leisure society was the great twentieth-century delusion. Work is the new leisure. Talented and ambitious people work harder than they have ever done, and for longer hours. They find their only fulfillment through work. The men and women running successful companies need to focus their energies on the task in front of them, and for every minute of the day. The last thing they want is recreation.
We have annexed the future into our present as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us.
We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.
Horns sounded from the trapped vehicles on the motorway, a despairing chorus.
Wilder went into his sons’ bedroom. Glad to see Wilder, they banged their empty feeding-bowls with their plastic machine-pistols. They were dressed in miniature paratroopers’ camouflage suits and tin helmets – the wrong outfit, Wilder reflected, in light of what had been taking place in the high-rise. The correct combat costume was stockbrokers’ pin-stripe, briefcase and homburg.
Consciousness is the central nervous system’s gamble that it exists...
One rule in life”, he murmured to himself. “If you can smell garlic, everything is alright.
They’re listening to the sun, Charles. Waiting for a new kind of light.
Idealists can be quite a problem when they get disgusted with themselves.
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass-merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the pre-empting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen.
Beyond the silver span of the motor bridge lay basins of cracked mud the size of ballrooms – models of a state of mind, a curvilinear labyrinth.
Everywhere the air had become a vibrant yellow drum. A heavy sunlight freighted the foliage of the trees. Each leaf was a shutter about to swing back and reveal a miniature sun, one window in the immense advent calendar of nature.
The core identity is Traven, a name taken consciously from B. Traven, a writer I’ve always admired for his extreme reclusiveness – so completely at odds with the logic of our own age, when even the concept of privacy is constructed from publicly circulating materials. It is now almost impossible to be ourselves except on the world’s terms.
The flies festered over the bodies, in some way aware that the war had ended and determined to hoard every morsel of flesh for the coming famine of the peace.