review by Bill Kirton

It's
at times a challenging read, but it repays you for persisting. Its principal
narrative elements are music (both in the making and playing of instruments),
art, sculptural methods and artefacts, language, academia, anaesthetics,
surgery, psychiatry, genetics, history and prehistory, philosophy,
autobiography, sex, time and humour. But the reader is led very gently into
these meditations. The book opens with a video of an installation made by the
author. It’s made of plastic and copper and the hand-held camera zooms in to
the sculpted faces, catches the pulsing effect and poses the question ‘What’s
this got to do with the book?’
There’s
then a preface which tells us this is ‘a semi-interactive novel’, which ‘begins
with a series of seemingly unconnected short stories, interspersed with other
materials such as videos, photographs, audio clips, paintings and drawings’.
And, while I may have made this sound like a trial, these stories are a series
of short, very accessible, self-contained narratives with no pretensions. The
sketches, photographs and other non-verbal elements which separate them
continue to challenge our perceptions and ask similar questions about their
place in the narratives as they force us to bring different perspectives to
bear on the ‘reading’ experience.
As
the book develops, the disparate threads of the preceding narratives are
brought together to ‘explain’ some of them but mainly to analyse how creative
thinking works. Its general thrust is that creative thinking stretches the
norms, actually reshapes reality or offers an alternative one. ‘The point,’
writes the author, ‘is that the human mind is worth more investment in time,
development and interest than we commonly seem to have time, motivation or
education for.’
He
fuses the infinite and the local, the eternal and the instantaneous, macro and
microcosm, high style and vulgarity – all in the cause of creativity. The
!Leonardo mind doesn’t accept limitations. Make no mistake, the book is
challenging but the challenges are to the reader’s own creativity and
willingness to make choices.
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