A Cruel Man Delighting in Flowers
...the mildness to which men ... had yielded was only half of the intoxication of beauty, while the other half ... was of such surpassing and terrible cruelty—the most cruel of men delights himself with a flower—that beauty ... failed quickly of its effect...
Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil
Jeremy Davies is made of ink, but don’t dip a feather in him. It tickles. He once painted a fingernail black and no one really noticed. He was disappointed. He’s also an editor, a religious atheist, a liker of strong coffees, a Shakespeare-lover, a political anarchist and someone who rarely has a pen when he needs one. He has been a PhD candidate, a personal trainer, a life model, a bouncer, an infantry soldier and someone who rarely had a pen when he needed one. He has had words published in a variety of places, in a variety of publications, in a variety of forms, in a variety of moments: Canada, Wet Ink, SMS and twelve minutes past three in the afternoon being some of these. His first novel, 'Missing Presumed Undead', will be re-published by Satalyte Publishing in February 2014. A second is on its way.
Rice’s narrative flow is effortless and breath-y, as always, and she manages to compel the reader along, sometimes with a whip, sometimes with a carrot, but the energy of this story really flags. There are some gear-shifts structurally, but Rice has often used this kind of technique very powerfully. What is particularly lacking is the sense of ambiguity and menace emanating from central characters. Plenty of sanctimony and undying love – enough to make you choke at some points and almost find a hero in the one unforgiving bastard that painfully presents himself – and plenty of superlatives for a whole range of seemingly flawlessly spiritual characters that would make the average angel look at his/her watch and cover a yawn. Where was the abject moral fluidity the story began with, other than a few easily justifiable fibs here and there? Where was the fractured humanity of her previous work? The Style was there, a Story was there, but the was little of the expected Substance.
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