CERN Zoo - A DFL Real-Time Review (Part 3)

CONTINUED FROM HERE: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2009/10/cern-zoo-dfl-real-time-reiew-part-two.html

 Turn The Crank

"Jonas was standing outside what had been Woolworth's plucking a quiet tune out of his acoustic guitar."

But not quiet for long, as an organ-grinder with a caterwauling organ disrupts the pitches of various buskers. This is, for me, a very effective Horror story that tells of the mayhem caused and of how people can be caged as if in a Zoo in more ways than just in a cage. Without reading it, you wouldn't believe me if I told you.  I'm only glad - that although this is a typical British city scenario - it appears it all takes place on an island hopefully far from where I live. 

Significantly, from the stuffed hippo in the previous story to the organ-grinder's stuffed monkey (both of whom come to life in their own special ways), this turns the clock as well as the crank in much the same way as in Elizabeth Bowen's masterpiece of a story: "The Inherited Clock".  Like beng sucked into the Collider itself. (19 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later) .

The Devourer of Dreams

"...the balance between madness and sanity tipping many times before I wrestled it straight."

I really think this story is even more horrific than its own author may realise and even beyond the scope of its own words. It mentions an Isle of Cern at the beginning (matching the island in the previous story) but search how you might it is only linked in some obscure corner elsewhere in the raw text to a zoo - whence the text's huge spider-like creature (that both milks others and is milked itself for dreams) derives. This story itself makes you think you are its imaginative creator by dint of reading about that creature for yourself. It's a sort of story that milks the reader to feed itself.  I cannot emphasise that enough. It's circular like the Collider and your head starts spinning at the implications. Not only a shadow from the future disguised as the past but a shadow of itself made double by being you as well as itself. (19 Oct 09 - another 3 hours later)

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Just Another Day Down On The Farm

"The small striped animal sat petrified as he grabbed it and dragged it from the safety of its cage."

Caged animals and a care regime that ends ... I actually can't tell you how this brief piece ends for spoiler reasons which is why I won't.  But it is ostensibly THEORY-based and quite quite cruel. And hilarious. I don't know if this gives you a clue but the author wrote to me when he or she knew I was doing this review saying: "I'm pretty sure that if you want to travel back in time you would have to use Llamas. Travelling to the future is possibly best powered by gerbils, though there is probably a strong case for a mix of Yorkshire Terriers and Gnus.  If I can be of further help please let me know." (19 Oct 09 - 30 minutes later)

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Strange Scenes From An Unfinished Film

"'I'm not important. I have nothing to offer... I have no story to tell.'"

In some ways similar to 'The Devourer of Dreams', this story has power beyond its own means. It seems half-finished in itself, if not Unfinished. It also shares the fabricated (theatricalised) visions I sometimes see in "Mellie's Zoo" and "The Shadow's Departure"... and it is telling that the 'unfinished film' is on Video, i.e. a spool's slow spinning into which the protagonist is sucked as if into the (unfinished?) Collider in a similar way to how I hypothesised the sucking-into of 'Turn The Crank'.  It is mysterious how it also has the power of a famous Nemonymous story of the past ("The Vanishing Life and Films of Emmanuel Escobada") and, furthermore, the Director of the film in question in this Cern Zoo story is assassinated before his career takes off, as if the imputed author writing about it is also 'assassinated' by the story he or she is writing and that we are reading.  Coupled with elements of deja-vu, this is a remarkable tale that grows on you even as it shrinks in size and diminishes into static, but the visions in its last two pages are surely sufficient recompense alone for buying Cern Zoo. (19 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)

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 Lion Friend

"She had the kind of nervous self-effacing personality that instinctively compelled people to be cruel to her."

My morning starts with a re-reading of this highly poignant tale of a derelict Zoo which still has caged animals - an original scenario at which I defy you to stop thinking about as you go through your own day. Also, a believable Office situation where our protagonist is bullied for no other reason than the shadow of Fate somehow determines it.  As well as in itself, this brief story, when complementing (and being complemented by) other stories in this book, is a landmark reading experience and it is a shame that it has so far mainly stayed under the book reviewers' radar. Perhaps that it is its Fate, too.  I love it and will come back to it over the years to re-live the experience. (20 Oct 09)

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The Ozymandias Site

"Our Five were on the verge of all-out civl war..."

This is a substantial SF story. Well-written. Significant, too. How significant, I'm not sure, as I am not a current expert on modern SF. I would like someone who is an expert to tell me how significant it is. My gut feeling, every single part of me, tells me it is highly significant. And not just because it explicitly mentions Cerne Zoo!  It is specially significant in the light of THEORY. The Hadron Collider supposedly in 'civil war' with itself is just one level of consideration - and there are several other levels of this plot relevant. If there is something significant going on between this Book and the Future (CERN-wise), then this story is its ring-leader. A first person plural narrative of a five-way-colour uncollective-conscious in one 'body' is an observation on my part that only scratches the surface of this story and its repercussions or implications. I need others to report in and give their views. And I also wonder if I missed whether we ever know the colour of self? (20 Oct 09  - three hours later)

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Cerne's Zoo

"...Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, among others who have contemplated the possibility that souls exist in not only people..."

Another important story that has so far escaped under the radar. A touching and original ghost story about Zoo creatures and the death-bed confession of Cerne Lincroft (Christened thus as he was said to be conceived under the aegis of he Cerne Abbas chalk giant) who once smuggled an elephant with him on an aeroplane between USA and UK because the elephant felt home-sick. However, the story is far more tender and serious than that implies.  It has a telling connection with THEORY, too, vis a vis its take on Animism. (20 Oct 09 - another 4 hours later)

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Sloth & Forgiveness

"'I was OK until you stood on my toe - and then it all went down hill from there.'"

An enjoyably quirky Aesop-type fable that at last explains what Cern Zoo really is and gives an aspirationally happy ending (by inadvertence) to "Just Another Day Down On The Farm" and with its take on forgiveness gives an oblique slant on THEORY.  Bravo! (20 Oct 09 - another 30 minutes later)

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City of Fashion

Now we really come to the beginning of the poignant dying fall of 'Cern Zoo' as a book.  A worthy companion pub story to "Artis Eterne" - here a pub called 'The Cerne Zoo': marooned in the downtrodden, increasingly sodden City with its close but changing community of pub regulars, all dreaming of when the Swiss landlord moves them (as he falsely promises) to a new pub in the Swiss Lakes. It is not a surprise to me that it is Switzerland: to where British people travel these days (because of the law) for an assisted death by euthanasia: and where CERN is situated inasmuch as some commentators say not that the Collider is sabotaging itself from the future but actually committing suicide. [And the landlord has family connections with a glass factory, the one which, I infer, is described in "The Shadow's Departure"... perhaps appropriately]. (20 Oct 09 - another hour later)

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Fragment of Life

This ends the book as 'To Let' similarly ended 'CONE ZERO', ordinary life now in credit crunch Britain, and like the recession-islanded pub in 'City of Fashion', property becomes just places for ghosts rather than people. But before that process is ended, here, in 'Fragment of Life' (like one of my all-time favourites stories, i.e. 'Fragment of Life' by Arthur Machen), there is almost a wishful-thinking on my part for a mystical undercurrent to the bare necessities of prose. Yet, poignantly, not for long. This heart-rending story concerns an ordinary working-class family's engagement with childbirth. And its echo in a 'ghost' next door seen with a glass of milk. Almost unbearable. This Ghost Story (for that's what it essentially is in an original way) should be anthologised in future Ghost Story collections as one of the modern greats.  I wonder if the milk is akin to that in 'The Devourer of Dreams'? I can speculate forever about some of the implications. Indeed, I feel I am witnessing here a parallel to THEORY as now discovered to be threading this whole book: the future soul trying to speak to its present soul (Dead Speaking through opposite windows in two houses) but in fatal symbiosis? 

This story has one of the best last sentences of any stories I've read. So it must be one of the best last sentences of any book I've read, too! I won't quote that sentence but it seems to echo my thoughts on fatal symbiosis above: but in a perhaps more tantalising vein. Not hopeless so much as open-ended.

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I will now leave others of a more strictly independent frame of mind to evaluate the book, but I hope my own views as its editor and publisher at least give some food for thought vis a vis life, the universe, everything. (20 Oct 09 - another 90 minutes later)