The Beach - by John Fraser (Hardcover)

About the Book

The Beach consists of two new tales from John Fraser. 'The Beach' and 'Memoirs, Memorials'.

Book Synopsis

The Beach consists of two new tales from John Fraser

What is a human life worth? If you save someone's, what is it worth to you - and if you seek a reward, how do you get it, whatever it may be? Is that life, perhaps, the only valuable thing there is, that has value only to the person who wins twice - getting their life back, and not having to give a reward? The characters in The Beach seek answers to this question - what is a life? what worth does it have? - travelling through many remote places and civilisations.

Memoirs, Memorials examines a devious spy - a spy on the secrets of life. If saving lives accumulates confusions, a heap of partial, disparate conclusions - what is a life of duplicity, fiddling, false witness and falsity in general, worth? It seems a fiction, in which someone writes all the parts and is the hero/heroine. Is it meaningless, to be condemned, or is it victimless, as victimless as ordinary, straightforward relationships and personalities - with their bad marriages, bad bargains failures, catching infections from partners who should know better?

Review Quotes

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 it 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. And deeply within the flow of the narrative, sustaining its onward march, are all the involved textures of the invented societal life, the colours, the animals, the architecture, richly delineated, very strange but always crazily believable.

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. It is not my business here to write about all the books, but I can see an arc of argument and progress which delivers in The Storm, one of his most recent, both a fresher dry wit and a direct speed of narrative which makes it indeed something like a written version of a graphic novel. And it is quite up-to-date, offering as it does a cynical take on the last of old Europe and the growing hegemony of Asia. 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.