Fiction Review
Thoreau Bound —
A Utopian Romance in the Isles of Greece
A comic novel by O. Thoreau
Paperback, 200,000 words
Two volumes, each $ 16
Zorba Press, 2006
http://www.zorbapress.com/books/thobound.html
Reviewed by Barry Palm
In the ancient island of Crete the main protagonist, O. Thoreau, fleeing the sad materialism of his native USA, finds his natural disposition of character and soul affirmed in Crete. The story has deliberate Homeric resonances with the homeward journey of Odysseus. O. Thoreau finds that to survive this journey he must cultivate his already natural qualities of personality: sincerity, openness, intelligence, imagination, creativity, sense of justice and humor. His most significant learning, comes mainly from extraordinary women who carry resemblances to the goddesses of ancient times.
“Mythic stories and real adventure merge.”
Mythic stories and real adventure merge. It is as if the ancient wisdom is within all of us and we dance in recognition of it and the joy of it. The Narrator tells the stories of his past year's adventures (in medias res, ala the Odyssey) as he waits on a modern ferry boat which has been delayed by a series of misadventures. Thoreau and his friend Panzano enthral the passengers with their humor and acquired wisdoms concerning love, sex, relationships and the art of living life to the full.
"In every work of genius," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." This spritely novel creates such an effect in this reader. The adventures of Thoreau take place in modern Crete but also in the penumbra of Ancient Greece. The narrator's journey is a celebration of life, love and learning in this ancient land. O. Thoreau's experiences remind us of our forgotten or neglected sensibilities concerning relationship to one another and to nature. The playful and profound myths of Ancient Greece guide and entertain us on this journey with O. Thoreau. This hilarious romance is populated with characters of diverse personality but united in a common passion for life. Some express this passion by bashful love, others by unabashed sexuality, still others by searching for a Utopian paradise.
The author weaves the ancient gods and myths through the story for a clever purpose. It was a stroke of psychological genius of the ancient Greeks to attribute everything to the gods. It is interesting also that these gods look like remarkable extensions of the human psyche, all of them capable of powerful expressions of love and also petty envy and revenge. These are interesting gods, vulnerable in their own way to indignities, capable of being offended, upstaged, tricked and even cuckolded. These Greek gods were awesome because of their ability to effect a powerful divine consequence to their emotions. If they wished they could wreak havoc and ruin upon human life, simply because they were in a bad mood. These are interesting and useful gods. The burden of human responsibility and the paralysis of guilt were removed by the convenient phrase: "The Gods were not with us today!" As a consequence, catastrophic mistakes in human judgment and character could be attributed to the absence of a god's approval on the day. Since the human mind develops with experience and reflection there can be in human thought sudden eruptions of genius.
This is an engaging novel because there is a fascination in all of us concerning the mystery of men and women, the longing for the beloved, the watchfulness, the deceptions of need, the confusions of passion and the wonderful energy of it, the psychology of desire, the dead-end paths of materialism, the different kinds of love, what it really means to think and live freely. This novel takes us on this enquiry, playfully, not didactically.
How the reader approaches this book is, I think, important. In our times we have been seduced by the addictive feeding of pellets of information, visual and auditory sound-bites, tiny morsels for taste only, not nourishment. These bits of information carry sensation but no meaning. They excite and manipulate our nervous system and feed nothing to the soul. If one approaches this novel with a mind already colonized by the inveigling deceptions of marketing then he or she will feel a discomfort with this novel. It is a lengthy story which carries meaning. It addresses the sad atrophy of feeling and intelligence in our contemporary culture. . Like any other epic this novel describes the contest between two great forces: ‘Love' and its manifestation, ‘beauty' and ‘Fearful Greed' and its manifestation, ‘ugliness'.
Thoreau Bound is a brave new world of a book, and thoroughly enchanting! A joyful, Rabelaisian comedy about the beauty, complexity, and mystery of human relationships. D. H. Lawrence, a rebel not unlike Thoreau, had wanted to call his novel Lady Chatterly's Lover, 'Tenderness'. Tenderness between women and men is the exquisite essence of this book.
About the Reviewer: Barry Palm
Barry Palm is an Educational and Sports Consultant living in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, Australia. He supports teachers with professional enrichment sessions in both state and private schools. His particular interests in education are the extraordinary inner life of the child and the impact of negative self consciousness upon learning and performance. His expositions on the child's inner life, expressed in children's art, have changed adult perceptions positively and profoundly. He helps students who have been marginalized at school by circumstances which have depleted them of confidence and joy. He is also part of the educational team for Coach Education at the Sydney Academy of Sport. This is one of the leading government sponsored sports coach education programs in Australia. His specialty there is in communication techniques for coaches which affirm and nurture talent and which do not sabotage performance in athletes. He presents topics of educational, social and human interest to community groups and has presented to educational interest groups and conferences in Australia and the United States. Barry is currently writing a book on these topics to support parents, carers, teachers and coaches in their vital roles. The principal theme of his writing is how to honor the inner life of the child and ways to prevent or heal the deleterious impact of negative self-consciousness upon learning and performance.
