Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

So, over the last month I have read Germaine Ellson’s by all accounts completely alright book, Ever’s More, and I confess it made me feel a little uncomfortable. The book starts mildly with a famous quote by Robert Graves: “It is slightly inconvenient to: mock a poet, love a poet, be a poet.” And it only gets okayer from there.

We meet the main character, a decent man with no name who can’t help but point out to the reader that our emotional responses somehow seem stunted. He mentions, in direct communication with you the reader, that watching a dog react to its owner coming home in a wholly okay way almost suggests that there should be a word beyond okay. “What if,” he says as if inviting us to contemplate with him, “the human emotional range went beyond mildly uncomfortable and mildly comfortable.” He does not quite have it in him to make it into a question.

Other characters in the book quickly bring him down to earth by pointing out that the adverbs mildly or almost or moderately or blandly or not exactly are a necessary component of the adjective phrase, just like how you can underwhelm but you cannot whelm. You can be all right but not all wrong. The limitations of our language, the place where the borders go, literally define us and to venture beyond those dells into uncharted semantic territory is akin to go sea-diving and touch the bottom of the sea and to dig and to expect water. It is just sand. And you are running out of air, and it is starting to feel like something might happen that could threaten the amounts of okay you feel in the future.

“It is just sand,” is a line repeated many times throughout the novel, often when the main character accidentally comes up with a neologism that seemingly challenges the status quo of our limitations. “What if there is more?” he asks, rudely and provocatively leaving out any kind of noun after the “more”. This is just poor editing in my opinion; the scene where this happens has the main character observing the ball of fusion that brings light to our planet become increasingly obscured by an ocean. It is a kind of attractive sight, we are informed. He picks up a rock and places it on the ocean by waving his hand in an okay arc and letting go at the right moment, causing the rock to fall upwards a little bit. I asked myself, “more what? More rocks? More light? More water?” but it is clear that Germaine Ellson does not care about that. It is just more sand.

The hill-crest of this sort of bumpy ride of a book comes when one character, who is the sister of the main character, ceases to exist and starts to produce a lot of blood instead. This is inconvenient for the main character in many ways, especially how it gets the front of his shirt sticky with blood. As he feels a little sad and starts to need glasses he turns to the reader again, and says a lot of things I did not understand.

This book made me a trifle uncomfortable. I do not think you should read it. Three stars out of five.