=book recently read: A History of the Imagination by Norman Lock=

What is this novel about? Quite frankly, I don't know. In the tradition of the best sorts of novels, I don't think its "about" anything in particular. It's thoroughly "novel." Ostensibly it's a kind of picaresque adventure following an unnamed narrator who embarks on a journey to Africa at the beginning of the 20th century. He is searching for meaning and certainty in a world that seems on the verge of apocalyptic changes. It's a little like "Gulliver's Travels" on better hallucinogenics. Like Swift, Lock is cruelly satiric. And very funny

I'd never heard of Norman Lock before. This is a crying shame. He's 65, so it's not like he's just burst onto the scene. How could I have missed him?! Well, for one thing, he's publishing novels and short stories out of very small presses without the greatest of distribution and no fanfair that I ever detected. But that's really no excuse. I should have heard of him through the grapevine. What's the matter with my grapevine?  If I hadn't wasted such a big chunk of my life…well, let's not even go there. As they say, better late than never. (But is that true? If it's never, then you'd never know what you'd missed; you don't end up kicking yourself, etc.) As it is, it might well have been never if I hadn't discovered this book shelved out of order. I was kneeling on the floor of a Goodwill used bookstore in Tallahassee, Florida, on Christmas Eve, looking through the "s" section. Maybe Santa Claus put it there for me. Later, doing a little internet investigation, I found out something about Norman Lock. You, too, can find out something about him here: http://www.normanlock.com.

Norman Lock

A partial list of characters that pop in and out of this novel:

Prince Kong (before he became King)
Sigmund Freud
Enrico Caruso
Anna Pavlova
Raymond Roussel
Teddy Roosevelt
Henri Matisse
Thomas Edison

The narrative is fractured, self-conscious, and meta to the max. Time and space are violated frequently—and joyously. Lock acknowledged his "crimes" against the conventional when he has conformity's Cosa Nostra pay him a fictional warning visit. They attempt to strong-arm him back to the storytelling version of the straight-and-narrow.

The delegation arrived to protest my "utter disregard of reality as it is commonly understood." I argued muscularly for my point of view, but they soon pinned me down. Waving a sheaf of soiled pages under my nose, they demanded immediate and unconditional redaction—"or else."

"Or else what?" I asked.

"We disavow all knowledge of you, repudiate any publications that may result from your present commission (though God knows who would be mad enough to publish such idiocies!), and, as final proof of our disdain—we cut off your legs."

"That last part seems a bit extreme," I said, ignoring the saw that was being sharpened for my rehabilitation.

"It will show the world you haven't a leg to stand on in these fantastic alterations of the truth."

"Define 'truth,'" I challenge, but they would not.

Instead, they set about to shake some sense into me. They did so until my back ached.

Growing tired or bored at last, they unpinned me from the ground. I rose, clapped the dust from my hands, and left for Mombasa without a word.

The intimidation fails and Lock continues on his merry, rule-breaking way.

There is something reminiscent of William S. Burroughs in Lock's dry, sardonic, pseudo-academic tone—but it's a Burroughs without the xxx-rated homoeroticism, without the scatology, without the violence, without the obscene language.

Consider what our narrator discovers when he visits The City of Radiant Objects:

Chairs will float if one has never thought of sitting on them.

The sea in itself is not in the least frightening. It is only the idea of drowning that makes it so.

Lock writes as if chairs could indeed float—and as if he could too. He writes with no fear of drowning in the torrent of narrative chaos that he gleefully unleashes. Anything can happen and anyone can show up on any page of "The History of the Imagination." This is what a book—in particular, a novel—should be.

Another partial list of characters that pop in and out of this novel:

Albert Einstein
The Wright Brothers
Houdini
Florenz Ziegfeld
Apollonaire
Charles Darwin
H.G. Wells
Colette
Igor Stravinsky
The Invisible Man
Tarzan

In the course of his adventures, our hero learns the formula for raising the dead but discovers that the dead are resentful of the disturbance; they prefer to remain dead. He's there to witness the erection of Eiffel's second, even more magnificent, albeit invisible tower. He has a knock down, drag out fight with God Almighty Himself. He murders Sigmund Freud. He sails off into the North Atlantic to slay icebergs in revenge for the sinking of the Titanic—but ends up falling in love with the icy behemoths of the sea. And that, as the saying goes, is just the tip of the iceberg.

Actually, I think I know what this novel is about, after all. It's really no mystery. Lock tells us what it is about:

Mine is a history of possibilities. I write of possible encounters with the unknown. Time is richer than you suppose. You imagine it as a succession of singular moments like a string of pearls. I see it as the night sky with its countless stars.

Lock doesn't mince words, though he could if he wanted. You get the sense that he could frappe and stir-fry them as well. That he could make a bicycle or a tasty sandwich out of words, if he chose.

What can be imagined, is. The movements of the brain, the heart—the landscape of the body and desire—these are worth setting down. We're all creations. The products of desire. And imagination is a precondition of desire.

Later, he says:

There is another history. There is another history that exists side by side with the one you know. In it all that I have told you is true. (You have never heard of it? You are reading it here: A History of the Imagination.)

You say: But such a history is a figment!

I say to you: All histories lie.

Am I insane?

I wonder.

And I don't care.


In other words, Lock can create his own world. Each of us can. Does that make us delusional? To whom? To the people who are creating the authorized version of the world? To the masses who, lacking sufficient imagination and daring of their own, accept by default the official version? Who gives a damn what they think? Well, so many do. Do you? You don't have to. You can sign your own Declaration of Imaginative Independence and secede from the mass delusion. Do you dare? The King will be angry and you'll be charged with treason, betraying the official version of reality. A capital crime, I should add. 

Norman Lock has become, virtually overnight, one of my favorite authors. One good thing about coming to him so late is that, minus A History of the Imagination, I still have his entire oeuvre ahead of me. What might I have become if I had stumbled upon his work earlier? There's no way to tell. As Will Rogers advised on a recent coaster I was given along with a glass of ice water: "Don't let yesterday use up too much of today." There's nothing to be gained by lamenting all those Norman Lock-less years—and, a happier thought, still so much to read.