Cicada Gambit

Selected extracts from Cicada Gambit, 1983, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney

2, BROAD STRATEGIC THEMES: PLAY ON BOTH WINGS (pp 12-13)

I am, of course – my name makes that much evident – of Greek blood; and, something unusual among my countrymen, I excel at chess. I am not, I think, a vain person, despite the extraordinary and unwelcome attentions that have been lavished upon me recently, and my estimate of my own abilities you may take as an objective one.

These, at any rate, I regard as the salient facts so far as the events I propose here to recount are concerned. That other facts, perhaps other perspectives, glimpses through unexpected interstices, will reveal themselves during my narrative I know: to set down an experience such as mine on paper is to submit oneself to the circumambulations of the curious or the merely morbid, and I do so in full foreknowledge that judgments will be passed, comments, aesthetic and moral, not always pleasing, will be bandied about, there will be talk in pubs.

And on talk: I am aware of a certain formality, a certain, how shall I put it, stiltedness in my use of the English language; but I do not think this something for which I ought to apologise. It is not my native tongue; it could not in any case be said to possess the emotional, the musical expressiveness (the fustian quality?) of Greek; and what I am about to relate partakes in some ways of the formulaic, of the ikonic almost – if ikons could be said to move, as, in the chiaroscuro of a whitewashed village chapel I have sometimes seen them do – to the extent that an idiom looser than this of mine would tend to blur and soften the already blurred lineaments of those experiences which are of consequence in the midst of so much admittedly colourful but supererogatory detail.

For, as is perhaps commonly the case, much has apparently happened; there have been moments in recent months when I have felt myself swirled about somewhere near the centre of a whirlpool of overwhelming facts (Herakleitos truly said – if he said it, a topic, after all, of conjecture among scholars – that one cannot step into the same river twice; still, having stepped once one may be swept away by it) – yet upon analysis the essential elements can be seen to be as pure, as diagrammatic, as a Reti study or a rook-and-pawn ending by Rubinstein.

16, CONTROL OF THE CENTRE (pp 193-195)

Dr Skogg was unhappy.  He always was, on Bloomsday, and always for the same reasons; but he went ahead in the same way every year, obliviously expectant that just this once everything would go off perfectly.

It was inherent in the nature of his expectations that they were never to be fulfilled; but, acute enough though he was in all other ways, this was something that had simply never occurred to him. Each of the long list of fiascos – and he had been trying for over ten years now – he ascribed to a different, wildly unlikely, never-to-be-repeated accident or catastrophe which had exploded unexpectedly upon a set of otherwise irreproachably acted out procedures.  It was noticeable, true, that each time disaster struck at a different point in the ritual peregrinations which constituted his day’s observance, but that, after all, was surely only to be expected, given the length and complexity of the ritual and the series of elaborate correspondences and analogies which had to be built up between his own largely fortuitous experiences during the day and the events of Joyce’s novel.  He sometimes wished that he could allow others into the secret: no-one was aware, had ever been aware, that on the sixteenth of June Skogg was laboriously going through as close as possible a re-enactment of the events of Ulysses: no-one had noticed that on one day of the year he behaved with conspicuous oddity, and that there were striking points of resemblance between the oddities of each year; not even the alert staff of the Clarion had picked up the significant fact that Skogg visited their offices once a year and once only; it had not been remarked upon by the clientele of the Wessex that once and only once a year Skogg, normally an apolitical if not exactly a pacific man, tried to pick political quarrels at the bar (it should be noted that he found himself to some extent obliged to play all the characters in the book himself, which added notably to his difficulties); and the residents of the various purportedly non-existent brothels of whose services he was compelled, this one night of each year, to avail himself, took it all, so to speak, in their stride.  All of this was very much as Dr Skogg wished it – it was his ritual after all – but did lead to inconvenience from the very beginning and, eventually, the sort of disasters that occur when incomprehension of one’s motives leads to misunderstanding – serious misunderstanding – of one’s actions.

Further reading

BOOK REVIEWS

‘A Bit of a Shock’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 December 1973, p 2. Review of Coast to Coast: Australian Short Stories 1973 chosen by Frank Moorhouse.

‘Mailer Lost in Admiration’, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 February 1974, p 15. Review of Norman Mailer, Marilyn.

‘Time of Torture for a Minority’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 March 1974, p 15. Review of Alan C. Kors and Edward Peters, eds. Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700: A Documentary History.

‘The SF Ghetto’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 July 1974, p 15. Review of Isaac Asimov, ed. Where Do we Go From Here? and Thomas M. Disch, ed. Bad Moon Rising.

‘Things Falling Apart’, Sydney Morning Herald, 14 September 1974, p 15. Review of Gunter Grass, From the Diary of a Snail.

‘Bardic Mantle’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 September 1974, p 13. Review of Robert Adamson, Swamp Riddles.

‘Friends in a Skinner Box’, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 October 1974, p 17. Review of Piers Paul Read, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors.

‘Quirky, Haunting Mélange’, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 November 1974, p 15. Review of Les A. Murray, Lunch and Counter Lunch.

‘Overcome by Soft Drinks’, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 November 1974, p 15. Review of Frank Moorhouse, The Electrical Experience.

‘Monstrous Genius’, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 February 1975, p 13. Review of Brad Darrach, Bobby Fischer vs the Rest of the World.

‘Diamonds in a Stewpot’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 April 1975, p 13. Review of Anthony Burgess, Napoleon Symphony and the Clockwork Testament.

‘Scarred Veterans’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 September 1975, p 13. Review of Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison, eds. Hell’s Cartographers: some Personal Histories of Science Fiction Writers.

‘Umberto Eco: A Rose by Any Other Name’. Scripsi 3, no. 1, April 1985, pp 165-168. Review of Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose.

‘Meditations on Sunbeams and Slippers, Gorillas and Galantine’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 February 1986, p 46. Review of Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar and Marguerite Duras, The Lover.

‘No Outrage, Just Excellence’. Sydney Morning Herald, 13 September 1986, p 23. Review of Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn, eds. The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets.

Untitled Review. ABC Radio First Edition, 28 January 1988. Review of Michael Dransfield, Collected Poems.

‘The Solitude of the Critics of Literature’. Weekend Australian, 20-21 February 1988. Review of Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell, eds., Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings.

ESSAYS

‘Concerning A Cartload of Clay’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 September 1971, p 19. Reprinted Age, 2 October 1971; Advertiser (Adelaide), 16 October 1971.

‘Games with Infinity: The Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges’. In Cunning Exiles: Studies of Modern Prose Writers, ed. Don Anderson and Stephen Knight, Sydney, Angus & Roberston, 1974, pp 36-61.

‘The Arts’. In Rudolph Brash, This is Australia. Paul Hamlyn, Dee Why, 1975 (first edition).