Kavanagh Jabberwock

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-915568-45-8
Verlag: Dedalus Ireland
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 0, 442 Seiten

Reihe: Dedalus Ireland

Imagine if Flann O'Brien, with a little help from James Joyce, had rewritten Alice in Wonderland or Laurence Sterne had sent Don Quixote on a voyage alongside Lemuel Gulliver, then you have entered the world of Jabberwock - an anarchic novel full of delights and fromulous pleasures. It tells the story of Ignatius Hackett, who rises in 1920s Dubilin to the top of the journalist tree before he is undone by words and has a spell in Dean Swift's Mental Asylum. With Europe on the brink of war, his life takes a turn for the better when his journalistic skills are remembered and he is dispatched across the water to investigate a spate of verbal outrages in a topsy-turvy world in which fonts and footnotes flourish while puns and paradoxes proliferate at an alarming rate. Spurred on, he travels to France and into the dark heart of Germany, and gets caught up in a sinister chess-game of police and informers, of spies and revolutionaries behind which moves the shadowy Ouroboros Brotherhood. Who can be trusted, when words themselves are no longer content to be bound in dictionaries, but are in danger of being pressganged as wonder-weapons in the new World War? 'JABBERWOCK fizzes with wit and ingenuity - a linguistic riot of hiberno-anarchy.' Ronan Hession, author of 'Leonard and Hungry Paul'.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kavanagh, Dara

Leseproben

pertaining to a famous parley in the , and a most curious chess-game

The round man in the poncho presiding over the inner parlour of the was, of course, R. M. Smyllie, a figure who, as he needs no introduction, shall receive none. Asked for a job description, the legendary editor liked to reply “To cut a long story short.” Hackett’s attention was called back to the young curate, who had set a pint of plain porter before him and was waiting for something to happen in consequence of the action. With a start, three things came to him: that he had absentmindedly ordered the beverage; that a pint of plain cost 10d; and that his portable goods came to the derisory sum of seven pence ha’penny. It was not the first time his absentmindedness had landed him in a pickle. While his thoughts scattered in chase of imaginary mice to find a phrase adequate to the situation, his fingers counted and recounted the grubby coppers in his pocket. The problem was, even had he recognised the former journalist, the curate could scarcely have allowed him the missing tuppence ha’penny on tick, his credit was so shot by this juncture.

The hiatus at the counter had begun to attract the attention of the sundry customers scattered about the bar at the periphery of Hackett’s myopia. With a magisterial nod toward the curate, R. M. Smyllie dispelled any possibility of monetary embarrassment. He allowed the impecunious customer to nod his gratitude and take the edge off his thirst, then, ‘I take it, Mr Hackett,’ his voice boomed out, and it was unclear whether it was the once celebrated name that had captured the attention of the bar or the decibel volume, ‘that you’re abreast of the spate of lexical crimes currently assailing the hereditary foe?’

Now, as Hackett’s old college friend McCann would have put it, he was and he wasn’t. In the course of his daily peregrinations about the capital, one eye, albeit blurred by myopia, always alighted hungrily upon the headlines hawked by the newspaper vendors. There were also the bulletins gleaned, albeit muffled through the floorboards of his room, from the Marconi wireless in the living room of the dosshouse, though Needles Nugent was too tight-fisted to allow the set to be switched on for more than a paltry quarter hour of an evening. So that Hackett was only dimly aware of the series of verbal outrages that had begun to discombobulate the Home Counties. So he made an equivocal gesture to intimate the degree to which he was and he wasn’t.

‘I see,’ nodded the editor, ‘I see.’ So seeing and so saying, he drew from a stack of newspapers beside him the nethermost and, frabbling it in such a way that a single article was foremost, he passed it along the counter to Hackett. The latter, who had as the attentive reader knows pawned his glasses, made a show of pattling the full array of his pockets before, irrigating the sentence with a watery smile, he declared, ‘I appear to have left my digs without my spectacles.’

‘No matter,’ said the Sligo Scotsman, ‘no matter.’ He proffered his hand to a bespectacled acolyte sitting nearby. ‘Mr Wood. If you would?’ Mr Wood would, and his glasses were passed along to the down-at-heel columnist. They were not of perfect focal length, nevertheless, as Hackett held them before his eyes, the typeface, the article, indeed the entire counter swam into view. So too the barman and the mirror behind him. And that was crucial for what was to follow.

Hackett unfrabbled the newspaper — it was a copy of the Logdon Gravitas already two days old — and perused the article that had been circumscribed in red ink. ‘BEDLAM IN BOTOLPH’S’ ran the headline. A cursory glance told him it dealt with another of the spate of lexical outrages then afflicting the south-eastern corner of the neighbouring isle. Such snippets as he’d gleaned from the communal Marconi had tended to be anecdotal, not to say comical, and gave no intimation there may have been a manxome counterfeit cell at work bent on the disarticulation of the United Kingdom. But if no lesser a figure than R. M. Smyllie was taking an interest …

Now, it chanced that in a corner of the there was a chess-game proceeding, and Hackett being an aficionado of the game and ever afflicted with a mentality, his concentration flitted between the article in his hands, the chess-game in the mirror, the commentary of the Sligo Scotsman to his side and the unopened summons in his pocket. This wasn’t merely whimsy. The fact was, ever since his time as an asylum inmate, Hackett had become more than circumspect when it came to printed matter. However, for convenience, the article is presented in its entirety, without diversion, distraction or interpolation, herewith:

BEDLAM IN BOTOLPH’S

The congregation of St Botolph’s in Chat’em was in for something of a surprise last Sunday when Dr Martin Coyne, Bisharp of Rockchester, took to the pulpit. No sooner had his Grace begun to deliver a sermon on the evils of calumny than heads began to turn, one to another, in bemusement. For the learned Bisharp kept returning to the notion of ‘segnum’. What could he mean? Was it perhaps a Latin tag? It was only when he stressed the difference between ‘segnumi of omission’ and ‘segnumi of commission’ that the more alert began to suspect the Doctor was spraking of good old-fashioned sin. In much the same fashion, ‘grodlum’ was after some time understood to refer to original guilt, for are we not all born ‘grodlumous’? But what ‘lali perpengi’ might be remains anybody’s guess!

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the misfortunate Dr Coyne, who is celebrated in Lambert Palace for his eloquence, consistently tripped over the very calumny he was there to preach against, giving the word an extra syllable, not by virtue of a stutter, but, as it were, in full consciousness of the addition. It is with regret that we must tell the reader that his Grace’s repeated references to ‘cacalumny’ occasioned a coconsiderable degree of merriment among the more uncocouth elements in the cocongregation.

All the time, however, the Bisharp remained oblivious to the cause of this gaiety. Worse was to come, for to round off the ordeal, a general sniggering was to be heard when ‘bgrrgl’ found its way unexpectedly into the final paragraphs of the sermon! Following on the farce of the Major of Gillingham’s sprake last Wednesday, and the brace of near incomprehensible pamphlets put out by the Rockchester Hysterical (sic) Society the previous month, one wonders if there isn’t something contagious in the Medway region that is reducing its public figures to mere stammerers and malapropists!

While one train of Hackett’s thoughts was assimilating the gist of the printed matter and a second was ferrying away the ominous image of the reversed harp, a third was distracted by the matter of the chess-game tendered in the virtual bar, itself tendered within the mirror behind the curate. And that runaway train ran loosely as follows.

To the rear of the looking-glass bar, which he supposed corresponded to the front of the pub, there was a game of chess taking place. Now, the player of the black pieces had his back to the bar, and to the mirror. But Hackett was more interested in the white player. He was of similar build, and was wearing an identical beret to his opponent. Indeed, they could almost have been reflections one of the other. Perhaps they were brothers. But what was far more curious was the white stick that was folded up on the white player’s lap, and the dark glasses which obscured his eyes. Indeed, but for the absence of a greatcoat and campaign medals, this could have been the very veteran he’d encountered at the GPO. But then, did all the blind not resemble one another? After all, what import could appearance hold in their dark world. And his companion? Hackett wondered if the black player, whose back was to the mirror and therefore, he supposed, to the counter, might be just as blind.

The game was in the early stages, at least insofar as the capture of pieces was concerned. It was difficult to tell who had the advantage from the opening, the asymmetry of which Hackett recognised as the dragon variation of the Sicilian defence. And yet there was something altogether curious about the set-up, altogether not . It took Hackett several minutes to nail it. There was an incorrect quality about black’s fianchettoed bishop, even taking into account that in the looking-glass world the kingside had become the queenside and the queenside the kingside. He knucked his fingers. The black piece was white! Which is to say, its colour was black, as you might expect. But it stood on a white square. Now, Hackett could have sworn that black’s king’s bishop should be black. It was the black queen’s bishop that was white, and the white queen’s bishop, black. He ribbled his chin. Unless it was another effect of watching the game in the mirror?

But of course that made not the blindest bit of sense. You might just as well say that the double clocks which sat beside the players ran counter-clockwise. Though now he thought about it, they might, depending on whether the Coriolis effect was reversed in mirrors. But in the looking-glass world, that would still correspond to time moving forwards. Non-plussed, he watched a couple of moves, and noticed that while the black player used the arm on the kingside to move his queen’s knight and tap the black clock, the white player, he of the white stick, used the queenside hand to capture the black piece and tap the white clock. Now, normally, that would make the white player left-handed. But then the black player too would have to be a...