Three stories about The Ends of the Earth by John FraserMaking the world uninhabitable is a prospect facing us all, each has a strategy to hasten or retard - even avoid - it. Such a project would be the greatest exploit of an evolving species - greater than the creation, quicker than biology and a cock-eyed triumph of the good life and its sciences. Most of us alive won't know if the plan succeeds, so hypothesis is the mode proposed. The people described in these thematically connected tales are precarious, but very human. Extinction would come when the exploration of the planet has barely finished - one thinks of the poet's 'round earth's imagined corners'. If the world indeed is not flat, it still can be conceived of as having ends.
In 'Rain', the characters display their comfortably familiar habits - competition, jealousy, distraction. They find they're ill-equipped to wait out their end - which comes (or maybe not) from an unanticipated direction.
'Summer Nights' has its protagonists at the edge of modernity - in the shadow of a monster tower, they seek their space, a 'green', beyond exploitation, beyond the limitations of their work and relationships - and only partly do they succeed.
'The Esplanade' sets its scene in an imaginary 'Cambodia', where the past, war and massacres, still looms over the new visitors and long-term occupants. Preservation of the ruins means also preserving the realm of Death. The story ends with a parade where Death and human power are both featured, in a temporary equilibrium.
Praise for John Fraser's fiction:
'One of the most extraordinary publishing events of the past few years has been the rapid, indeed insistent, appearance of the novels of John Fraser. There are few parallels in literary history to this almost simultaneous and largely belated appearance of a mature oeuvre, sprung like Athena from Zeus's forehead; and the novels in themselves are extraordinary. I can think of nothing much like them in fiction. Fraser maintains a masterfully ironic distance from the extreme conditions in which his characters find themselves. There are strikingly beautiful descriptions, veiled allusions to rooted traditions, unlikely events half-glimpsed, abrupted narratives, surreal but somehow apposite social customs.
'Fraser's work is conceived on a heroic scale in terms both of its ideas and its situational metaphors. If he were to be filmed, it would need the combined talents of a Bunuel, a Gilliam, a Cameron. Like Thomas Pynchon, whom in some ways he resembles, Fraser is a deep and serious fantasist, wildly inventive. The reader rides as on a switchback or luge of impetuous attention, with effects flashing by at virtuoso speeds. The characters seem to be unwitting agents of chaos, however much wise reflection the author bestows upon them. They move with shrugging self-assurance through circumstances as richly-detailed and as without reliable compass-points as a Chinese scroll.'
John Fuller, Whitbread Award winning poet and Booker Prize nominee
