Iceland Spar, Chapter Ten: The Gentleman Bomber of Headingly!

We're still with Lew in England. He's trying to get him some of that good ol' Cyclomite, but not having much luck, even when he enlists the assistance of Nigel and Neville, who are huge drug enthusiasts. They go to a laboratory run by this here Dr. Coombs De Bottle, who performs sort of autopsies of bombs to see how they were detonated and how they were built, and it's here that they learn of this sinister Gentleman Bomber of Headingly, who attacks crowds at cricket matches with phosgene bombs--phosgene being a deadly chemical that was used as a weapon during World War I, an important event in this novel. Also, real life. This guy makes you think of the Kieselguhr Kid, a similarly mysterious terrorist and/or anarchist. Is it more doubling? Anyway, Nigel and Neville end up rustling up some Cyclomite for Lew's birthday, so that's heartwarming.

Lew's going to meet Professor Renfrew at Cambridge, along with Nookshaft and Crouchmas. Renfrew--who seems like a regular guy, not just a metaphorical figure--wants Lew to bring in the Gentleman Bomber, but GOOD LUCK with that.

That's about it--though there are a lot more geopolitics in this chapter; Great Game stuff. Renfrew avers that Inner Asia is the planet's heart, and therefore "control Inner Asia, and you control the planet" (242), which I believe is going to become relevant real soon.

Bloody hell, this turned out to be a short entry. Hope I'm not losing my touch already. Well, we'll see.

[Spoiler: I'm not.  These things are just gonna vary in length.  This one is short, but some of the ones upcoming are absolute beasts.  Look forward to it, or not.]

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rue du Départ: Everybody Now--

Image
Well, here it is. The last section of the book. What a long strange yeah okay. It actually starts with Dally talking into the ether but convinced that her dad is hearing her, which he is. So that's nice. She and Kit are married and move to Torino in 1915. That's nice. What's, uh, less nice is that she meets Clive Crouchmas again: She knew that Clive's demands would be as minimal as a girl could ask. Conjugal bliss? Flings with other men? no problem for Clive. There was  that awkward business of his having once tried to shop her into white slavery, but both understood that it was perhaps his one moment of genuine blind passion, everybody deserves at least one of those, doesn't he, and at the end of the day Clive was grateful for it and Dally was semi-sweetly amused.  (1067) I can't fucking EVEN with this. I'd go so far as to say that I literally  can't even. I mean, like, what the hell is this? Is she getting paid for this? Going with her old sugar daddy
Read more

Bilocations, Chapter Five: Higher Math and Gayer Sex!

Image
Here we are, back in England, which has been Lew's milieu, but although he's present in the background, this chapter isn't about him. The most important thing is that it introduces an important character, Cyprian Latewood, the "feckless scion" of Latewood's Patent Wallpapers. This chapter also gets into the difficulties with the idea of a coherent sexual identity. There's the idea, which you'll be familiar with if you've read Judith Butler, that one's gender isn't a stable, coherent thing but rather a series of acts, which are subject to destabilization. We will see A LOT more of that later on. I remember the first time I read this, I found it very confusing, but now I have a clearer idea of what's going on. Or so I think. So the thing about Cyprian is: he's very, very gay. BUT. At the same time: he has a serious crush on Yashmeen, who, I don't want to alarm you but, is a woman. And a woman who, at this time, seems to be a lesbi
Read more

Against the Day, Chapter Nineteen: The Chums of Chance on Counter-Earth!

Book's really winding down at this point. This isn't the last we'll see of the Chums, but it's definitely pivotal. They have the idea that they should go UP. Up being equated with north, as you will remember from way the fuck back at the beginning of the novel. And there's "an updraft over the deserts of Northern Africa unprecedented in size and intensity" (1018). So...they should go there to go up, I guess? Why not? The Inconvenience  is growing, turning into more of a social thing; Miles has "hired a top-notch cooking staff, including a former sous-chef at the well-known Tour d'Argent in Paris." Also, they have Pugnax's--girlfriend?--introduced in this oddly florid passage: Sometimes he thought he'd been waiting for her all his life, that she had always been down there, moving somewhere just visible, among the landscapes rolling beneath the ship, deep among the details of tiny fenced or hedged fields, thatched or red-titled rooftops
Read more