Where are we? Where are we going? What’s in store?In John Fraser’s latest novel, the answer to the question ‘how might we prepare for catastrophe?’ comes in the last section of four thematically linked examples.In The Colours of Air many characters live in an apartment, a mocrocosm - intellectuals from Sartre to de Beauvoir, security experts, emigres and refugees, traditionalse from the country, all involved in strategies of survival. In the end, the question becomes to survive, what must be jettisoned, what has irrevocably been lost? Peace and War chronicles couples joining up and spinning off, East Europeans on the margin of a West where music and drink are the context - hiding and burying the dead is a main task - Pavel, the protagonist seems to find permanence in stonework, sculpture, but all wait expectantly for the sound of horses, horsemen and their messages. These characters are on the margin - there seems to be no core, though they are seeking it. In Interlude two displaced intellectuals are being vetted for their status, their security. The theme is ‘space without freedom’ - waiting, with expectancy, but without knowing what comes next. The answer finally comes in The Answer. It’s daring, a risk, a leap into the unknown, with probable disastrous results.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. 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. John Fuller, Whitbread Award winner and Booker Prize nominee
