Life During Wartime - novel n. 2: synopsis

by Louis on September 4th, 2007

LIFE DURING WARTIME – A SYNOPSIS

Life During Wartime narrates the story of Seymour Snowe, an ideologue for the Ministry of the Interior, and his twin brother, the President of the breakaway province of Quelquebeck.

Dispatched to New York, Snowe is to promote the works of his native Paddock-speaking intelligentsia; at the same time, he is creating axioms whereby the Queenglish-speaking populace still residing in Quelequebeck are being repressed through Joy Divisions – symbolically, arts retreats – meant to house – and isolate – them from the “native” Paddocks.

As Snowe reduces the Queenglish lexicon to that of everyman, he discovers the richness and variety of the unspoken word: visual arts, and the expanding powers of the imagination. At this point, he seeks his own freedom, and seeks exile – a defector.

The story is narrated by Caius Bloomfield, his translator, who in turn has a parallel story to tell: he is a recent widower coping with his unacknowledged suffering and his struggle to keep the household together: his two teenage children, a girl who is imploding and his joyously outrageous son.

Throughout his narrative, set in NYC and the suburbs, he is confronted by rage, intolerance, outlandish views of people he meets on the street, or as he commutes; they also explore various galleries and museums, this while Snowe elucidates his views, views which are translated into the Brown Book.

Bloomfield, aware of his own complicity, aims for redemption by rising within the Party’s echelons so as to strike at its heart.

What we desire strengthens the enemy; what weakens us the enemy seeks; to achieve
enduring peace & prosperity, we must rid ourselves of what they seek, what they desire.

Chairman Ti Pao Zhing
On Disarmament and De-Industrialization in
Questions of New Economic Policy at the Open
Session of the Sixteenth Plenary of the Paddock
Labor Party of the People’s Republic of Quelquebeck

A coup, a coup, a kingdom for a coup.

St Bruno, President of Quelquebeck, to Dr C. Bloomfield
Recorded telephone conversation
Archives of Ministry of Interior

Seem:
Once in, Rise;
The Higher, the closer:
Strike.

Caius Bloomfield to his daughter Helen in a letter
Archives of Ministry of Interior

All the world’s a beauty contest
And I am scarred
Sadness has lashed my body
With burns

Helen Bloomfield to her mother
Archives of Ministry of the Interior

QUELQUEBECK & THE INDEX

In collusion with BOSS, or the Bureau of Strategic Studies, the Ministry of the Interior’s most urgent project was the Index. With an impetuous stroke, centuries of sham Queenglish metaphysics rejected, pseudo-science brushed into dustbins, artifice swept into the kitchen sink. The sewage of the erudite – regicide, pragmatism, eschatologist, plausible deniability, empiricism, parallel convergence - would be expurgated from Paddock libraries, Queenglish tomes dispensed to the Archives, in truth, incinerators. Purple prose would be whitewashed, as would mala affectatio, genus turpe, rhetorical devices employed to befuddle the working class who fancy amusement, not bemusement by ludicrous quandaries. All this dictated interminable scrutiny, diligence and boldness.

“Foul censorship,” howled a chorus of Queenglish sympathizers - self-exiled, self-
imploding hate-mongers, agitators, traitors, terrorists, arsonists, rapists and scoundrels posing as avant-garde performers in, indubitably, the most retrograde ethically slack self-abusive émigré enclave on this side of the Solar System: Nouveau York.

BOSS countered with:

The Index prescribes countermeasures to the ascendancy of dross.

A recent oeuvre struck from Index:
Cruise Missile Baby
Let us add a comma, in movable type, and ignore the implications:
Cruise, Missile Baby
Cruise Missile, Baby

In any event, since its suppression, Ti Pao Zhing – l’auteur - has twice attempted
suicide - unsuccessfully. May BOSS grant his wish.

Zhing was the philosopher most cited by Quelquebeck’s Paddock-speaking Premier, Bruno St Bruno. Zhing’s postulates, heretofore known as the Brown Book, an opus-perpetually-in-progress, was abridged and published as Shades of Brown.

Shades of Brown became required reading for anyone interested in understanding the nation’s DEF, or Demographic Engineering Facilities; for everyone else, it became compulsory by decree. Let us turn a page at random. The letter E.

Efficiency has served the System well. Efficiency has subjugated customs, traditions,
peoples, labor unions, ministries. Countless cruelties have been perpetrated by the High
Priests of Efficiency. We, too, shall turn to Efficiency and preach its commandments,
regulate our own territories as we deem suitable to our needs and requirements in the
Almighty Name of Efficiency.

In the consequent carnage of collective zeal, Ti Pao Zhing, and his personal secretary,
Seymour Snowe, was implicated and very much accountable for.