There is so much I loved. I read it in terms of transitions- from day to night, collective to individual, innocence to experience, from the real to the spiritual/liminal- and what I like about the ending is that it makes this idea of transitioning problematic. I'll come back to this. I love the way that Arcadia is constructed. The name itself, Arcadia, intimating the ancient, gardens, legend, Eden, Utopias, but also what has been lost. That for which we have only stories, remains, relics, emotions. There is a nice ambivalence when we begin to read, and we are not sure where to place Arcadia: in the present, for this is fiction, or in the past, because the atmosphere as the daily routines are described implies that this space cannot hold. This space has in some sense already been lost. When the rhythms of the village in the day are described I thought your prose was gorgeous. It has something of DH Lawrence's `The Rainbow' to it. And something of Achebe's `Things Fall Apart'. I was fascinated by the transition from collectivity to individuality. Opening out from a story about the village to a story about Timone. For the village is alive and laughing, singing, happy, functional- and yet at once it is habitual, ignorant, individuality is subsumed under collectivity. In the face of night and the unknown, the villagers are fearful. Are they like cattle? How conscious are they? It is important I think, that their village life was not romanticised; that we don't reach to it through nostalgia. And yet would we wish them anything different? I think the move into night is beautiful. The three illustrations with night-blue skies are striking and some of the sentences are so light and deft: ...before dusk had thought to touch the hills. & ...and watched the night take the landscape.... Lovely. From the collective comes forth the individual, Timone, who travels to the end of his world, to the threshold of the real, and peers into the world of the spirits. And the reader can't help but reconstruct the village and the forbidden ground and the realm of spirits in their own psyche. The passage in the spirit realm is powerful. It made me think the passage toward the end of Baldwin's `Go Tell It On The Mountain', when the boy loses himself in a religious experience. The same hectic, kaleidoscopic momentum. The same sense that everything that is described is itself a language for something else. Something felt. Something deep and primordial. Something you have known or understood since the depths of childhood. There is sadness here too. And your language is simple and clearsighted, which is so effective. And then there is the ending. He has moved from innocence to understanding. He sits and awaits the coming of men. But it was not his world, not Arcadia, which has so damaged things. It is our world, the reader's world. So Timone was witness to a complaint which was not against him, but against us. His task is only to understand. It is our task to alter the direction of destruction. And yet we see through his eyes- through his need just to understand, and that grounds us. It also displaces us somehow. We are not sure where we stand relative to Timone, to Arcadia. And so the conclusion/the moral is scrambled. Doesn't fit into a simple formulation. Is left undone. Instead it resonates emotionally. And I think that is its final power. Timone's journey is not our journey. His transition is complete, his story has an ending, and ours is left open... we have searching left to do. - Max Hepley, Boundless Magazine
