Moonlite by David Foster (1981)

It seems that, unwittingly, Ruth Pitter had David Foster's number: 'The dirty demagogue, damned and out of date, / Howling the pains of fragmentary perception, / Horridly impaled on jagged spikes, / Teeth of the alligator-god, phenomenon / Acclaimed as actual and total.' (from My God Beholds Me). But I must come out from behind her. I cannot but acknowledge the prodigious invention on display here, and the almost chronic depth of implication drawn from that invention. Extraordinary, no other word for it. This seems to be widely regarded as a 'satire on colonialism' - the satire (if such it is) seems to me to be much more scattergun than that. I would call the space this inhabits by other names: the first 170 pages are experimento-gutturo-scientificised far Celtia. The last 50 pages or so are raucous-experimento-gutturo-scientificised-mythopolitic-Australiana. Foster calls for such explosions of nomenclature. Some of the great failures of this work are fascinatingly anticipated by the author in the work itself - two in particular: the fact that it presents limited purviews of Europeans (he has the crazed albino main character rattle off "All Irishmen aren't dunces, all Scotsmen aren't misers...") and the fact that emotion is detrimentally missing from the entire narrative (the same character admits near the end "I am a man utterly without human emotion of any kind! Nothing!..."). These appear like bandages in the text, in anticipation of exactly those criticisms, which I guess is minorly interesting metafictionally, and I suppose bodes well for my reading of Foster as his career progresses - he is at least aware of these weaknesses though kicking against the pricks of remedy. This is a fantasy, and a novel of ideas, and a warped kind of folkloric ritual-burning. But those three things can be so brightly accessible as to enrich a culture - I wonder if this book will be able to reach forward with enough universality to have the same effect? It's been thirty years at this writing - the case is well in doubt. (Just an aside - I believe it's possible that this book has an elder sister. Moonlite's potential sibling's name is Ottoline Atlantica. She's by Paddy Figgis (writing as Helen Wykham), and was published in 1980. She's the only one of hers I haven't yet read, but a quick examination of the first few pages confirms - lonely far western Celtic island, strongly experimental and tough-guttural approach, scientific tinctures, slipping in and out of paradigm and space-time. Oh hell, please save us from the Magic-Realist-Post-Colonialist comparative doctoral theses!)