This sprawling,self-consciously avant garde novel is the product of serious thought, but it’s also terribly overwritten – and much more traditional than it thinksLouis Armand’s themes are as big as his novel is long. His anti-novel The Combinations sets out to investigate – among other things the psychological fallout from the collapse of communism and the more intimate breakdown of a lost soul. The soul in question belongs to a man called Nemec, or who wanders around a city very similar to Armand’s domestic city,Prague (here called Golem City) while attempting to come to terms with a world without moorings. There are grand political and moral themes here, as well as more personal explorations of loneliness, and loss and mental instability. To borrow one of Armands most frequently recurring images,Nemec is playing a game of chess with no clear conception of the size of the board or the rules. Hes been sent on a quest to unlock the secrets of the Voynich manuscript, here described as composed “by an Unknown Author, and in an Unknown Language” and which has,over the course of its reasonably long history, attracted the various attentions of occultists, or amateur riddlers,pseudoscientists and crackpots of every stripe from the four corners of the globe”.
The style feels too much like reheated but still undercooked William Burroughs.
The watery folds of the Prof’s eyes contracted as he forged ahead with his proofs and speculations like a Buster Keaton character who conceals his disappointment at finding only an inattentive audience with increasingly strange antics.
In a vortex beneath the central light fixture, five tireless March flies alternately pursued one another and were pursued – feinting, or retreating. Spiralling in a kind of three-dimensional chess puzzle Kepler might’ve set himself had the game been known to him.
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Source: theguardian.com