A review of 'The York Deviation' by Sean Gabb
Note: The following review was originally published at Amazon.co.uk on 13th. June 2018. Link to original review: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/RZNP6GZU5IXSA?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp
Edward Parker, a middling lawyer from Deal, Kent, history graduate of the University of York, and overweight hypochondriac, wakes up to find himself back on the Heslington campus - not in our time, but some twenty years earlier, in 1981, when he was still a shy student there. Initially disoriented and confused, Parker soon finds his feet in a younger body; though oddly enough, this is only in outward appearance; physiologically, he is still middle-aged. He quickly re-befriends some of the resident undergraduates, including a science student, John Henley, with whom he goes for a nocturnal walk. The two end up undertaking a surreptitious exploration of a nearby archaeological excavation: an old Egyptian temple (which Gabb calls the Temple of Isis; there is an actual excavated Egyptian temple near York, the Temple of Serapis or Osiris).
While exploring the temple, Parker and Henley overhear two others enter, including a student known to and disliking of Parker. It's clear that there is some sort of conspiracy afoot on campus relating to something to be found within these temple ruins. It develops in the novel that this mysterious 'something' is of immense power and is wanted by senior figures in both the British and American governments, among others. It also turns out that Parker himself holds the key to this hidden power, in a very literal sense, and for that reason he is harried and pursued by various individuals, some of whom have come from the future like Parker has. To complicate matters further, a gravity-based barrier prevents Parker leaving the Heslington campus, which means that virtually the entire novel takes place there. The plot develops into a complex Dantesque fantasy involving various actors pursuing different motivations, and in which Parker, among others, has the task of saving the world from an invasion by a race of reptilians, who dominated the Earth in its distant past from a citadel known as the Primaeval City, only to be all-but wiped out by an asteroid. These demonic reptilians, led by the so-called Lords of the Council, have lain dormant for tens of millions of years, waiting for the moment when they could escape from their netherworld - a parallel physical dimension - and reclaim the Earth as theirs. Parker's very existence seems to be the needed catalyst for this apocalyptic resurrection, it being evident that he has some sort of link with the primordial beings. Each of the protagonists, including Parker, is offered some sort of tempting incentive in return for betraying humanity to the would-be reptilian overlords: and some duly do enter into a Faustian pact - or already have - though not in all cases with full cognisance of the implications or exactly whom they were serving.
This fantastical narrative should probably be read much like the sophisticate might read Shakespeare's Othello: as one long nightmare in which the central character is behaving as if in a dream and envisaging what he most fears, the helpless victim of his own perceptions and actions. The fear must be that, as in a Shakespearean tragedy, when the dream or nightmare ends, the consequences remain and have to be lived with as the new reality. Intriguingly, in contrast to Shakespeare's play, the central question raised in the novel - What is reality? - is tackled by Parker himself in the form of a narrative self-interrogation. Possessing quite the imagination and having already led a life full of dreamscapes, even before the events of this novel he has developed his own thoughtful test (the 'Parker Test') for deciding whether something is real or a dream (or nightmare, as the case may be):
(i). do the events recalled fit into the known course of your waking life?
(ii). were your senses fully engaged?
(iii). is what you recall in itself likely to have happened?
The question we may additionally ask, then, is: Does the York Dream pass this test?
Actually, this is not really a difficult question to answer - if we are able to conceptually differentiate dreams from memories. Neurologically, a dream is just the replaying of memories (experiences), including (among other things) previous dreams, whereas a memory is the recollection of experiences, again including (among other things) dreams. It seems logical that a vivid dreamer would have further and better lurid dreams, and if these dreams are too fantastical to reflect what are commonly-recognised to be physically-viable experiences, then they must be dreams of dreams. However, this being a novel, the problem has some niggles and wrinkles in the plot that make a clean resolution complicated: for instance, Parker has sensory experiences during these 'dreams'. It seems that, in a similar way to the character in J. G. Ballard's 'The Unlimited Dream Company', the nature of Parker's 'reality' may remain an unanswered question, much as in Othello. In common with Ballard's novel but unlike in Othello, the author of this novel has the character lucidly interrogating his own experiences in the first person.
A professionally-trained lawyer and something of an historian, also with a doctorate, Parker is fairly rational and concerns himself with evidence, perhaps too narrowly. Fantastical events, even when they happen right in front of him, only provide, for Parker, a natural basis for scepticism at what could anyway be a dream. Yet what he experiences on campus during this story is vivid and seems real, and so understandably Parker starts to question fundamentally what is reality and what isn't. Parker is intelligent and applies certain criteria to his situation in order to evaluate whether it is 'real' or not. He accepts scientific method and its inductive method of reasoning: rejecting First Cause deductions and ultimate causes, setting out instead to observe, hypothesise, test, quantify, measure, then generalise laws. He thinks a lot about Hume's dictates on evidence and reasoning: for instance, a conclusion should not go further than the evidence justifies. He uses Occam's razor, which specifically here translates into the principle that a supernatural explanation for something isn't needed where a natural explanation will do. He thinks about the way history works and how events can be evaluated through causation. As is tacitly admitted at one point, to an extent history is chaos: it's difficult or near-impossible to identify a singular source or cause. This, perhaps, is part of the appeal of supernatural explanations, which provide the First Cause and ex-post rational clarity and certainty that man-made intellectual inquiry cannot. In trying to work out whether he is in a dream or this is all real, Parker begins to appreciate the rootlessness, chaos and randomness of man-made existence: he does not know for sure where he is or how it all started or how it will end. Maybe also we can see here the appeal of free-standing conspiracy theories that rest on the idea of forces beyond our perception in civil war with us or among themselves, or both. Often these hidden rulers are presented as having supernatural or extra-physical powers, presumably because otherwise we would perceive them and they would then just be ‘ordinary rulers' - people who could be mocked, ridiculed, laughed-at and removed, like other real-life powerful or influential people.
Among the strange things that happen in the story are the appearance of a guardian monster, called Si-Rogath, that seems to protect and obey Parker, and the involvement of somebody called the Undertaker, who seems to be a metaphysical superintendent for events in the novel - acting almost as the First Cause 'god' or source of esoteric conspiratorial power that some people crave, ephemerally appearing and disappearing and seemingly directing things in secret, even in a way that seems supernatural, thus removing the need for proper inductive inquiry. Is all this likely to have happened, per the third criteria of the Parker Test mentioned above? Parker knows that all these things 'happen' at the least within the framework of a dream (or a dream within a dream), because other people on campus see them too and are wary of Parker as a result. Thus, Parker's doubt revolves not around his experiences as such - being sceptically-minded, he must trust his own senses - but around whether what is happening can be 'real' and not just a dream. That said, this confusing dream epistemology does not seem to undermine his essential Cartesian doubt: he knows he exists because of these very questions. It's just a case of whether he is dreaming it or not. The Undertaker says he is: calling it dreams within dreams, and the campus a bubble within a bubble, all of which the Undertaker has created for him. Parker is used to having lurid dreams anyway. It seems that all his life, he has been dogged by dreams in which he himself is an important member of the antediluvean reptilian race and has the Cassandra-like burden of warning the Lords of the Council of the asteroid and the catastrophe that will surely befall them, only to be ignored. But these really were dreams, or visions, and whatever their provenance, they were not actual experiences at the relevant moments. The events of the novel are different, in that Parker struggles to decide whether what he is experiencing is real, even whether that matters, and even what actually is 'real'? If a dream seems real, is it real? While reptilians and monsters seem not very likely as real experience, his senses seem to be working – for instance, early on in the story, he cuts his finger while exploring the ruined temple.
Beyond these ponderous questions, it happens to be that some of the characters in this novel are quite fun. For instance, I enjoyed very much Parker's North American professor, Grant Fairburn, a rebarbative historian and antiquarian who comes across almost as a conservative Howard Kirk. Fairburn believes in the existence of dimensions outside empirical perception and also holds to disciplines such as astrology. This greater open-mindedness is the source of tension with the more rationalist Parker. The different approaches to knowledge are discussed and contrasted in some of their didactic exchanges: Fairburn refers to a “world of appearances” being a “very small part of the universe” and the importance, as he sees it, of not dismissing 'other approaches' to knowledge emanating from outside the phenomenal and existential realm. The two also engage in intellectual sparing over what causes history, the fall of empires and civilisations (i.e. Byzantine Empire, Rome, Western civilisation). I also loved the off-wall use of Margaret Thatcher as a character, as it's based on how she was popularly-perceived. Without wishing to give too much away, there is even a scene in which she handbags one of the reptilians! One could argue that alone is worth the effort of reading this. Often when authors bring their politics into their fiction, it spoils things. See, for instance, my various reviews of John Grisham's novels for an example of this problem: Grisham's inability to resist imposing his 'right-on' politics on the reader has arguably ruined his critical merit as a writer. Interestingly, for Dr Gabb - a conservative-type libertarian - I would say the opposite is the case: his politics is evident to varying degrees, but if anything, it enhances his writing. The author does have fun with the Left. Campus feminists, for instance, start to worship Parker, believing he commands the monster, Si-Rogath, though it's not clear if they had seen Si-Rogath themselves, or spoken to others who had seen the monster. The point seems to be that even people, like Marxists, feminists, etc., who pride themselves on a basic rationalism can be suggestible, fearful and give in to base human impulses. It's a neat little turn, not just for the satisfaction it must give the author, but also more substantively for what the author is endeavouring to convey, in a subtle way, about political reality. The Left, feminists, Socialist Worker (Trotsykists) were mostly proto-Bolshevist and probably funded by the Soviets until the late 80s (and maybe by the Russian Federation beyond that, depending on whether you think Yeltsin and Putin are continuations of Sovietism). There must have been quite a few of these left-radicals at York, even as late as 1981. Parker opines that some people go mad by themselves, without mind control weapons, and no doubt some of these people gravitated to those views on account of personal frustrations and peculiarities and would have inevitably 'joined something', being the type of Leftists derided by Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier ["...every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, "Nature Cure" quack, pacifist, and feminist in England..."]. Yet these same people would argue that they are in touch with reality. They would argue that it is the Right who are deluded, due to false consciousness. They would argue that their beliefs are the rational outlook, based on the axioms of Marx's idealism-materialism, as expressed in the theory of historical materialism. But such beliefs, and the derivative views of the soft Left, put these 'rationalists' in a religious and non-scientific category of thought: false consciousness in particular is circular and non-falsifiable and by extension affords to other Marxian beliefs the same quality. To consider false consciousness, it is not difficult to see why university campuses have become pseudo-rational worlds unto themselves. I think the author is drawing somewhat on Plato's Allegory of the Cave when he depicts in this novel the union clerics of student politics as a sort of Socratic elite, one of whom the author figuratively compares to an Egyptian god. The anti-gravity barrier itself could be seen as a metaphor for Plato's Cave. The possible escape of the primordial reptilians from the proximity of campus and the damage, mayhem and havoc this would presumably wreak on the rest of society is perhaps the author's metaphor for the civilisationally-destructive horrors that were unleashed by his and the immediately previous student generation, the radicalised social-liberal boomers and early Generation X'ers, a process that really began in the late 1960s.
Another reviewer has criticised Gabb for allowing the story to seem like it was made up as he went along. Far from seeing that as a fault, for me it is part of the attraction of the story. This feels like an old-fashioned adventure, sort of a more mature and learned version of the Famous Five - the sort of material that, in grown-up form, would be good in the hands of this author. I do agree with another reviewer that the plot comes over as a bit inconsistent and there are a few too many loose ends. I think that could have been cured either by turning this into a series of novels, allowing the author to expand on each part of the story and create a more consistent narrative that answered all the questions that naturally arise in the minds of readers, or by doing the opposite and reducing the novel to a short story, using mostly just the material in the latter third of the book. Personally I would have favoured developing this into a series: if this novel is viewed as a detailed synopsis, there's a lot of promising material here. The use of York as the setting (or, perhaps more accurately, the University campus and Heslington) has also been criticised, but actually I quite liked this. York is quite similar to the City of London in some ways, both being Roman walled cities, and there is a great scope for a good yarn when an author has intimate knowledge of the Yorkshire city. Maybe more could have been made of interesting locations around York? There again, it could be that the author decided against this on the basis that he wanted to make it a campus novel only, emphasising the social cleave between modish students on a plate glass campus and provincial life nearby. Another thing is that the literary allusions are obvious, but instead of concealing this I think the author could have made more of it: for instance, it would have been entertaining to have Fairburn, who I think is a great character, play more fully and explicitly the ersatz 'Bad Angel' in Doctor Faustus. Also, and here just a minor detail, but given this is set in 1981, I was a bit confused that Parker uses pre-decimal currency. (Anyway, apart from all that, an important mystery remains to be solved: what on earth is 'lithokenesis'? This is the area of expertise of one of the characters, a fellow called Gladwell).
This is a campus novel mixed with psycho-fantasy and existentialism – sort of Malcolm Bradbury meets J. G. Ballard meets Gordon R. Dickson, with a touch of Anthony Price. It is the work of a highly-literate writer who is immersed in an academic and intellectual environment; it's not really for popular tastes. There is a heavy eschatological and religious theme in the references to the ‘Primaeval City’, in which one detects a discussion of the philosophical-theological debate between Calvinist and Augustinian Christianity. Among the plot-specific questions: if the reptilians ignored the Cassandra-like pleas of Parker's antediluvian incarnation, does that suggest they were pre-destined for damnation? I also surmised a civilisational-political allegory as I read this; the author is expressing, through the character of Edward Parker, his fear and anxiety about change in society. It's also fairly obvious that this novel must be autobiographicalistic; it even seems psychonautic in places, almost as if the author is telling us what happens when you take illicit drugs. York is Dr Gabb's alma mater, but the University's academic reputation is described or alluded to unflatteringly at various places in the novel. The Thatcher character goes as far as to call the institution [to paraphrase]: a “pretentious money-pit university”: implying that it’s a university without much substance in her view, its academic body just there to intellectualise and academicise. To be fair, this is not far from the truth. York was one of the plate glass universities and known as one of the institutions for the ‘posh but thick’ (a little like Exeter), the students mostly being middle-class minor private school-educated who do not have the ability to attend the dreaming spires of Oxbridge; and, as affluent and comfortable people often do, the students at these sorts of institutions traditionally have tended towards vacuous left-wing and neo-Marxist politics and modish thinking. Peter Hitchens attended York and claims he was a Trotskyist student while there. On the other hand, Dr Gabb was an undergraduate there and he was and is extremely bright; unlike Hitchens or the typical York student, Gabb was not, so far as I can tell, from an affluent background, and his politics were always conservative, albeit of the libertarian type. Is the Thatcher quote, then, a subtle dig on the part of the author at his alma mater, resentful of what he had to endure there? Perhaps the use in the story of the barrier, separating the campus from the rest of society, also tells us something about what the author thinks of 'trendy' modernist institutions like York? Oxford and Cambridge, the preeminent English academic institutions, emphasised excellence, but also socialisation: they are training grounds for the cognitive and professional elites. York, a lesser academic institution, seemed from the beginning to have a student body obsessed with social causes, rebelling against the socialisation of Oxbridge.
The main reason I like this novel is that the author brings together some of the subjects that most interest me: politics, history, archaeology - even a bit of Egyptology comes into it - philosophy, epistemology, ancient languages, literature, theology and religion, the validity of conspiracy theories, psychology and the paranormal, and more, are all interwoven into an entertaining story. I especially enjoy archaeological fiction. Parker has a “prejudice against field archaeology”, so stumbles around a lot, but this is partly what makes it a good story. His initial sidekick, Henley, the science student, is his more confident and adventurous foil, but Parker introduces knowledge and ingenuity and makes the discoveries when they are rooting around the ruined temple. However, there are limits to how Parker's knowledge and skills can help him understand reality. Translations can be read academically in perfectly-printed texts and dictionaries, but Parker is less confident when faced with the real thing in the form of contemporaneous inscriptions. Parker cuts himself while exploring the temple ruins and, with the memory of previous negative experiences in the field, urges Henley that they should go back to their university halls of residence and return the following evening, secretly having no intention of doing so. Parker's lack of nous 'in the field' raises the issue of how academic and popular history can be limiting. How do we know that the translations we are given, and the monographs, articles and textbooks - both for the academy and the public - truly represent the ‘real’ history and not an abbreviated, abridged or twisted version intended to mislead us? Not that anybody would suggest that history can be 'objective' (I've read Carr), but the translation and transcription of sources surely is a professional and objective endeavour, implying that the pursuit of actual history requires fieldwork and technicians, people willing to get their hands dirty. In a similar vein, Henley argues with Parker over the value and rigour of history. Is history just guesswork in the end? Parker readily concedes that history is not a science, it is “…just an understanding of the past according to the values of any particular historian”, but he also maintains that historical methods can be scientific, believing archaeology can be used in the service of history, to give it scientific credence. Henley, while not rejecting this entirely, replies that even archaeology is heavily interpretive and dependent on subjectivity: pointing to the excavated ruin they're both exploring, he asks: How do we know that the site was the Temple of Isis? Henley's point is that unless a historian (or archaeologist) can actually go back in time and make history experiential and more fully observational - something that can't happen - it can never have the basis of a science proper; it will always be Platonic rather than Aristotlean. In designating the temple ruins by the Ouse as the Temple of Isis, archaeologists and historians are inescapably reliant on theoretical-deductive axioms.
Another problem with liberal scholarship is thrown up by modern information technology, which gives us greater access than ever before to information, quotes, facts. At one point, Parker is preparing an essay for Fairburn and looking for a sentence in a book called 'The Dollar of the Middle Ages'. He reflects on how in the digital era of his middle-age, this task can be done quickly and easily, whereas in the pre-digital times of 1981 to which he has been mysteriously returned, the task is much more difficult, as one must rely entirely on paper sources and carry out the search manually in a library. I think this raises a deeper issue than that mentioned by Parker. What I would like to ask is: Does the digital era truly make us more literate or does it just allow ignorance to parade as knowledge and literacy? It's easy now to pull out pertinent quotes and refer to sophisticated ideas, but that doesn’t mean there is any underlying comprehension. In pre-digital times, the process of obtaining knowledge and learning was integral to comprehension: one had to learn to use a library, an academic skill in its own right, and then one had to familiarise oneself with books, manuscripts, monographs, articles, etc., a process of becoming ‘literate’. Digitism , in contrast, does not seem to embody literacy in its processes and methods of scholarship, and may, in fact, be encouraging a sort of sham pseudo-literacy, in which people fake learning and produce essays that facsimile ideas. The author perhaps alludes to this with his use of metaphor in the form of problems Parker experiences with a certain typewriter and pre-digital photocopier. By making tasks easier, do we become dumber? Parker's friends, when using the typewriter and copier, make typographic errors in a political leaflet, but these are quickly spotted, suggesting that analogue processes involve accountability and feedback, and self-correction and self-reflection, and are thus necessarily literate. Such mistakes would not be made now in the era of spell-check, but does this greater ease and convenience make us less smart by circumventing literacy-encouraging processes, instead allowing semi-automated technology to be literate on our behalf, in turn allowing people to give a fake impression of their abilities to the rest of the world without the pains and burdens of self-improvement?
If you don't share the author's intellectual interests, you may struggle through this novel, as the action doesn't really get going until about two-thirds in. That said, this author achieves just the right balances in his writing: he manages to be cultured without being pretentious, serious without taking himself too seriously, humorous without descending into farce, silly but not abjectly so. Plus this novel contains a brilliant Prologue, involving some of the best writing I have ever read. I enjoyed this; it's harmless escapism, and I'm giving it five stars.
While exploring the temple, Parker and Henley overhear two others enter, including a student known to and disliking of Parker. It's clear that there is some sort of conspiracy afoot on campus relating to something to be found within these temple ruins. It develops in the novel that this mysterious 'something' is of immense power and is wanted by senior figures in both the British and American governments, among others. It also turns out that Parker himself holds the key to this hidden power, in a very literal sense, and for that reason he is harried and pursued by various individuals, some of whom have come from the future like Parker has. To complicate matters further, a gravity-based barrier prevents Parker leaving the Heslington campus, which means that virtually the entire novel takes place there. The plot develops into a complex Dantesque fantasy involving various actors pursuing different motivations, and in which Parker, among others, has the task of saving the world from an invasion by a race of reptilians, who dominated the Earth in its distant past from a citadel known as the Primaeval City, only to be all-but wiped out by an asteroid. These demonic reptilians, led by the so-called Lords of the Council, have lain dormant for tens of millions of years, waiting for the moment when they could escape from their netherworld - a parallel physical dimension - and reclaim the Earth as theirs. Parker's very existence seems to be the needed catalyst for this apocalyptic resurrection, it being evident that he has some sort of link with the primordial beings. Each of the protagonists, including Parker, is offered some sort of tempting incentive in return for betraying humanity to the would-be reptilian overlords: and some duly do enter into a Faustian pact - or already have - though not in all cases with full cognisance of the implications or exactly whom they were serving.
This fantastical narrative should probably be read much like the sophisticate might read Shakespeare's Othello: as one long nightmare in which the central character is behaving as if in a dream and envisaging what he most fears, the helpless victim of his own perceptions and actions. The fear must be that, as in a Shakespearean tragedy, when the dream or nightmare ends, the consequences remain and have to be lived with as the new reality. Intriguingly, in contrast to Shakespeare's play, the central question raised in the novel - What is reality? - is tackled by Parker himself in the form of a narrative self-interrogation. Possessing quite the imagination and having already led a life full of dreamscapes, even before the events of this novel he has developed his own thoughtful test (the 'Parker Test') for deciding whether something is real or a dream (or nightmare, as the case may be):
(i). do the events recalled fit into the known course of your waking life?
(ii). were your senses fully engaged?
(iii). is what you recall in itself likely to have happened?
The question we may additionally ask, then, is: Does the York Dream pass this test?
Actually, this is not really a difficult question to answer - if we are able to conceptually differentiate dreams from memories. Neurologically, a dream is just the replaying of memories (experiences), including (among other things) previous dreams, whereas a memory is the recollection of experiences, again including (among other things) dreams. It seems logical that a vivid dreamer would have further and better lurid dreams, and if these dreams are too fantastical to reflect what are commonly-recognised to be physically-viable experiences, then they must be dreams of dreams. However, this being a novel, the problem has some niggles and wrinkles in the plot that make a clean resolution complicated: for instance, Parker has sensory experiences during these 'dreams'. It seems that, in a similar way to the character in J. G. Ballard's 'The Unlimited Dream Company', the nature of Parker's 'reality' may remain an unanswered question, much as in Othello. In common with Ballard's novel but unlike in Othello, the author of this novel has the character lucidly interrogating his own experiences in the first person.
A professionally-trained lawyer and something of an historian, also with a doctorate, Parker is fairly rational and concerns himself with evidence, perhaps too narrowly. Fantastical events, even when they happen right in front of him, only provide, for Parker, a natural basis for scepticism at what could anyway be a dream. Yet what he experiences on campus during this story is vivid and seems real, and so understandably Parker starts to question fundamentally what is reality and what isn't. Parker is intelligent and applies certain criteria to his situation in order to evaluate whether it is 'real' or not. He accepts scientific method and its inductive method of reasoning: rejecting First Cause deductions and ultimate causes, setting out instead to observe, hypothesise, test, quantify, measure, then generalise laws. He thinks a lot about Hume's dictates on evidence and reasoning: for instance, a conclusion should not go further than the evidence justifies. He uses Occam's razor, which specifically here translates into the principle that a supernatural explanation for something isn't needed where a natural explanation will do. He thinks about the way history works and how events can be evaluated through causation. As is tacitly admitted at one point, to an extent history is chaos: it's difficult or near-impossible to identify a singular source or cause. This, perhaps, is part of the appeal of supernatural explanations, which provide the First Cause and ex-post rational clarity and certainty that man-made intellectual inquiry cannot. In trying to work out whether he is in a dream or this is all real, Parker begins to appreciate the rootlessness, chaos and randomness of man-made existence: he does not know for sure where he is or how it all started or how it will end. Maybe also we can see here the appeal of free-standing conspiracy theories that rest on the idea of forces beyond our perception in civil war with us or among themselves, or both. Often these hidden rulers are presented as having supernatural or extra-physical powers, presumably because otherwise we would perceive them and they would then just be ‘ordinary rulers' - people who could be mocked, ridiculed, laughed-at and removed, like other real-life powerful or influential people.
Among the strange things that happen in the story are the appearance of a guardian monster, called Si-Rogath, that seems to protect and obey Parker, and the involvement of somebody called the Undertaker, who seems to be a metaphysical superintendent for events in the novel - acting almost as the First Cause 'god' or source of esoteric conspiratorial power that some people crave, ephemerally appearing and disappearing and seemingly directing things in secret, even in a way that seems supernatural, thus removing the need for proper inductive inquiry. Is all this likely to have happened, per the third criteria of the Parker Test mentioned above? Parker knows that all these things 'happen' at the least within the framework of a dream (or a dream within a dream), because other people on campus see them too and are wary of Parker as a result. Thus, Parker's doubt revolves not around his experiences as such - being sceptically-minded, he must trust his own senses - but around whether what is happening can be 'real' and not just a dream. That said, this confusing dream epistemology does not seem to undermine his essential Cartesian doubt: he knows he exists because of these very questions. It's just a case of whether he is dreaming it or not. The Undertaker says he is: calling it dreams within dreams, and the campus a bubble within a bubble, all of which the Undertaker has created for him. Parker is used to having lurid dreams anyway. It seems that all his life, he has been dogged by dreams in which he himself is an important member of the antediluvean reptilian race and has the Cassandra-like burden of warning the Lords of the Council of the asteroid and the catastrophe that will surely befall them, only to be ignored. But these really were dreams, or visions, and whatever their provenance, they were not actual experiences at the relevant moments. The events of the novel are different, in that Parker struggles to decide whether what he is experiencing is real, even whether that matters, and even what actually is 'real'? If a dream seems real, is it real? While reptilians and monsters seem not very likely as real experience, his senses seem to be working – for instance, early on in the story, he cuts his finger while exploring the ruined temple.
Beyond these ponderous questions, it happens to be that some of the characters in this novel are quite fun. For instance, I enjoyed very much Parker's North American professor, Grant Fairburn, a rebarbative historian and antiquarian who comes across almost as a conservative Howard Kirk. Fairburn believes in the existence of dimensions outside empirical perception and also holds to disciplines such as astrology. This greater open-mindedness is the source of tension with the more rationalist Parker. The different approaches to knowledge are discussed and contrasted in some of their didactic exchanges: Fairburn refers to a “world of appearances” being a “very small part of the universe” and the importance, as he sees it, of not dismissing 'other approaches' to knowledge emanating from outside the phenomenal and existential realm. The two also engage in intellectual sparing over what causes history, the fall of empires and civilisations (i.e. Byzantine Empire, Rome, Western civilisation). I also loved the off-wall use of Margaret Thatcher as a character, as it's based on how she was popularly-perceived. Without wishing to give too much away, there is even a scene in which she handbags one of the reptilians! One could argue that alone is worth the effort of reading this. Often when authors bring their politics into their fiction, it spoils things. See, for instance, my various reviews of John Grisham's novels for an example of this problem: Grisham's inability to resist imposing his 'right-on' politics on the reader has arguably ruined his critical merit as a writer. Interestingly, for Dr Gabb - a conservative-type libertarian - I would say the opposite is the case: his politics is evident to varying degrees, but if anything, it enhances his writing. The author does have fun with the Left. Campus feminists, for instance, start to worship Parker, believing he commands the monster, Si-Rogath, though it's not clear if they had seen Si-Rogath themselves, or spoken to others who had seen the monster. The point seems to be that even people, like Marxists, feminists, etc., who pride themselves on a basic rationalism can be suggestible, fearful and give in to base human impulses. It's a neat little turn, not just for the satisfaction it must give the author, but also more substantively for what the author is endeavouring to convey, in a subtle way, about political reality. The Left, feminists, Socialist Worker (Trotsykists) were mostly proto-Bolshevist and probably funded by the Soviets until the late 80s (and maybe by the Russian Federation beyond that, depending on whether you think Yeltsin and Putin are continuations of Sovietism). There must have been quite a few of these left-radicals at York, even as late as 1981. Parker opines that some people go mad by themselves, without mind control weapons, and no doubt some of these people gravitated to those views on account of personal frustrations and peculiarities and would have inevitably 'joined something', being the type of Leftists derided by Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier ["...every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, "Nature Cure" quack, pacifist, and feminist in England..."]. Yet these same people would argue that they are in touch with reality. They would argue that it is the Right who are deluded, due to false consciousness. They would argue that their beliefs are the rational outlook, based on the axioms of Marx's idealism-materialism, as expressed in the theory of historical materialism. But such beliefs, and the derivative views of the soft Left, put these 'rationalists' in a religious and non-scientific category of thought: false consciousness in particular is circular and non-falsifiable and by extension affords to other Marxian beliefs the same quality. To consider false consciousness, it is not difficult to see why university campuses have become pseudo-rational worlds unto themselves. I think the author is drawing somewhat on Plato's Allegory of the Cave when he depicts in this novel the union clerics of student politics as a sort of Socratic elite, one of whom the author figuratively compares to an Egyptian god. The anti-gravity barrier itself could be seen as a metaphor for Plato's Cave. The possible escape of the primordial reptilians from the proximity of campus and the damage, mayhem and havoc this would presumably wreak on the rest of society is perhaps the author's metaphor for the civilisationally-destructive horrors that were unleashed by his and the immediately previous student generation, the radicalised social-liberal boomers and early Generation X'ers, a process that really began in the late 1960s.
Another reviewer has criticised Gabb for allowing the story to seem like it was made up as he went along. Far from seeing that as a fault, for me it is part of the attraction of the story. This feels like an old-fashioned adventure, sort of a more mature and learned version of the Famous Five - the sort of material that, in grown-up form, would be good in the hands of this author. I do agree with another reviewer that the plot comes over as a bit inconsistent and there are a few too many loose ends. I think that could have been cured either by turning this into a series of novels, allowing the author to expand on each part of the story and create a more consistent narrative that answered all the questions that naturally arise in the minds of readers, or by doing the opposite and reducing the novel to a short story, using mostly just the material in the latter third of the book. Personally I would have favoured developing this into a series: if this novel is viewed as a detailed synopsis, there's a lot of promising material here. The use of York as the setting (or, perhaps more accurately, the University campus and Heslington) has also been criticised, but actually I quite liked this. York is quite similar to the City of London in some ways, both being Roman walled cities, and there is a great scope for a good yarn when an author has intimate knowledge of the Yorkshire city. Maybe more could have been made of interesting locations around York? There again, it could be that the author decided against this on the basis that he wanted to make it a campus novel only, emphasising the social cleave between modish students on a plate glass campus and provincial life nearby. Another thing is that the literary allusions are obvious, but instead of concealing this I think the author could have made more of it: for instance, it would have been entertaining to have Fairburn, who I think is a great character, play more fully and explicitly the ersatz 'Bad Angel' in Doctor Faustus. Also, and here just a minor detail, but given this is set in 1981, I was a bit confused that Parker uses pre-decimal currency. (Anyway, apart from all that, an important mystery remains to be solved: what on earth is 'lithokenesis'? This is the area of expertise of one of the characters, a fellow called Gladwell).
This is a campus novel mixed with psycho-fantasy and existentialism – sort of Malcolm Bradbury meets J. G. Ballard meets Gordon R. Dickson, with a touch of Anthony Price. It is the work of a highly-literate writer who is immersed in an academic and intellectual environment; it's not really for popular tastes. There is a heavy eschatological and religious theme in the references to the ‘Primaeval City’, in which one detects a discussion of the philosophical-theological debate between Calvinist and Augustinian Christianity. Among the plot-specific questions: if the reptilians ignored the Cassandra-like pleas of Parker's antediluvian incarnation, does that suggest they were pre-destined for damnation? I also surmised a civilisational-political allegory as I read this; the author is expressing, through the character of Edward Parker, his fear and anxiety about change in society. It's also fairly obvious that this novel must be autobiographicalistic; it even seems psychonautic in places, almost as if the author is telling us what happens when you take illicit drugs. York is Dr Gabb's alma mater, but the University's academic reputation is described or alluded to unflatteringly at various places in the novel. The Thatcher character goes as far as to call the institution [to paraphrase]: a “pretentious money-pit university”: implying that it’s a university without much substance in her view, its academic body just there to intellectualise and academicise. To be fair, this is not far from the truth. York was one of the plate glass universities and known as one of the institutions for the ‘posh but thick’ (a little like Exeter), the students mostly being middle-class minor private school-educated who do not have the ability to attend the dreaming spires of Oxbridge; and, as affluent and comfortable people often do, the students at these sorts of institutions traditionally have tended towards vacuous left-wing and neo-Marxist politics and modish thinking. Peter Hitchens attended York and claims he was a Trotskyist student while there. On the other hand, Dr Gabb was an undergraduate there and he was and is extremely bright; unlike Hitchens or the typical York student, Gabb was not, so far as I can tell, from an affluent background, and his politics were always conservative, albeit of the libertarian type. Is the Thatcher quote, then, a subtle dig on the part of the author at his alma mater, resentful of what he had to endure there? Perhaps the use in the story of the barrier, separating the campus from the rest of society, also tells us something about what the author thinks of 'trendy' modernist institutions like York? Oxford and Cambridge, the preeminent English academic institutions, emphasised excellence, but also socialisation: they are training grounds for the cognitive and professional elites. York, a lesser academic institution, seemed from the beginning to have a student body obsessed with social causes, rebelling against the socialisation of Oxbridge.
The main reason I like this novel is that the author brings together some of the subjects that most interest me: politics, history, archaeology - even a bit of Egyptology comes into it - philosophy, epistemology, ancient languages, literature, theology and religion, the validity of conspiracy theories, psychology and the paranormal, and more, are all interwoven into an entertaining story. I especially enjoy archaeological fiction. Parker has a “prejudice against field archaeology”, so stumbles around a lot, but this is partly what makes it a good story. His initial sidekick, Henley, the science student, is his more confident and adventurous foil, but Parker introduces knowledge and ingenuity and makes the discoveries when they are rooting around the ruined temple. However, there are limits to how Parker's knowledge and skills can help him understand reality. Translations can be read academically in perfectly-printed texts and dictionaries, but Parker is less confident when faced with the real thing in the form of contemporaneous inscriptions. Parker cuts himself while exploring the temple ruins and, with the memory of previous negative experiences in the field, urges Henley that they should go back to their university halls of residence and return the following evening, secretly having no intention of doing so. Parker's lack of nous 'in the field' raises the issue of how academic and popular history can be limiting. How do we know that the translations we are given, and the monographs, articles and textbooks - both for the academy and the public - truly represent the ‘real’ history and not an abbreviated, abridged or twisted version intended to mislead us? Not that anybody would suggest that history can be 'objective' (I've read Carr), but the translation and transcription of sources surely is a professional and objective endeavour, implying that the pursuit of actual history requires fieldwork and technicians, people willing to get their hands dirty. In a similar vein, Henley argues with Parker over the value and rigour of history. Is history just guesswork in the end? Parker readily concedes that history is not a science, it is “…just an understanding of the past according to the values of any particular historian”, but he also maintains that historical methods can be scientific, believing archaeology can be used in the service of history, to give it scientific credence. Henley, while not rejecting this entirely, replies that even archaeology is heavily interpretive and dependent on subjectivity: pointing to the excavated ruin they're both exploring, he asks: How do we know that the site was the Temple of Isis? Henley's point is that unless a historian (or archaeologist) can actually go back in time and make history experiential and more fully observational - something that can't happen - it can never have the basis of a science proper; it will always be Platonic rather than Aristotlean. In designating the temple ruins by the Ouse as the Temple of Isis, archaeologists and historians are inescapably reliant on theoretical-deductive axioms.
Another problem with liberal scholarship is thrown up by modern information technology, which gives us greater access than ever before to information, quotes, facts. At one point, Parker is preparing an essay for Fairburn and looking for a sentence in a book called 'The Dollar of the Middle Ages'. He reflects on how in the digital era of his middle-age, this task can be done quickly and easily, whereas in the pre-digital times of 1981 to which he has been mysteriously returned, the task is much more difficult, as one must rely entirely on paper sources and carry out the search manually in a library. I think this raises a deeper issue than that mentioned by Parker. What I would like to ask is: Does the digital era truly make us more literate or does it just allow ignorance to parade as knowledge and literacy? It's easy now to pull out pertinent quotes and refer to sophisticated ideas, but that doesn’t mean there is any underlying comprehension. In pre-digital times, the process of obtaining knowledge and learning was integral to comprehension: one had to learn to use a library, an academic skill in its own right, and then one had to familiarise oneself with books, manuscripts, monographs, articles, etc., a process of becoming ‘literate’. Digitism , in contrast, does not seem to embody literacy in its processes and methods of scholarship, and may, in fact, be encouraging a sort of sham pseudo-literacy, in which people fake learning and produce essays that facsimile ideas. The author perhaps alludes to this with his use of metaphor in the form of problems Parker experiences with a certain typewriter and pre-digital photocopier. By making tasks easier, do we become dumber? Parker's friends, when using the typewriter and copier, make typographic errors in a political leaflet, but these are quickly spotted, suggesting that analogue processes involve accountability and feedback, and self-correction and self-reflection, and are thus necessarily literate. Such mistakes would not be made now in the era of spell-check, but does this greater ease and convenience make us less smart by circumventing literacy-encouraging processes, instead allowing semi-automated technology to be literate on our behalf, in turn allowing people to give a fake impression of their abilities to the rest of the world without the pains and burdens of self-improvement?
If you don't share the author's intellectual interests, you may struggle through this novel, as the action doesn't really get going until about two-thirds in. That said, this author achieves just the right balances in his writing: he manages to be cultured without being pretentious, serious without taking himself too seriously, humorous without descending into farce, silly but not abjectly so. Plus this novel contains a brilliant Prologue, involving some of the best writing I have ever read. I enjoyed this; it's harmless escapism, and I'm giving it five stars.
