Books

Review by Francis Shepard

Feral Dreaming is an eclectic mix of fictionalised autobiography, manifesto and myth. The melee has subsections , though not delineated as such, of review. Difficult to grasp at first, but at the finish you realise that this whole shaky assemblage is a novel, which as the text declares, is like nothing you’ve read before, the scattered elements forming a whole. In the way of the poetic novel, it reflects the processes of daily living, of both major and minor thought, the coexistence in the mind of the petty and the profound.

Thank goodness for Joyce and William Carlos Williams, who bequeathed this nature of writing to us. And before them, for Walt Whitman and DH Lawrence, who urge us to live fully, as Steven C Davis does, without compromise.

Novels generally have at the head of them a single character. Here is a fictional self, Campion Truelock, a bookshop worker who begins to understand the power of fiction to subvert, occupy and overwhelm. Books that he very effectively organised in the reading store, organised so that the book-covers’ fabled imagery and coloration shines through to create mystery, are portals by which pass out to unknown worlds. They are also routes of ingress. The pinchpenny Gradgrind accountant who takes over the running of the store will find this out, and have his come-uppance. Ancient gods are in the world still, and alive.

The adventuring persona of Campion is ready to take this advice:

Believe in yourself, they said.
Trust your instincts.
If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t.
Except, of course, if you want to be an author.

He is led to many places, but finally back to the community of writers and the inner worlds they create – by no means passive, escapist inner worlds. Hathersage, Pennine village inspiration for Jane Eyre and from legend the burial-place of Little John, returns in the writing as a place of force and dynamism, acting on the present, an inspiration from the fictional world.

Hurnungaz walks beside you.
Mother Hode walks beside you.
Iona Wolf-bite walks beside you.
And you walk beside yourself.
You have all the strength you need.

This is the world that poet Fran Lock explores in her book Vulgar Errors / Feral Subjects, the clear uncluttered view of those set apart from society, whether as victims of colonialism, as recipients of a straight-jacketing culture, or as the downright dispossessed. ‘Feral’ is then an artistic standpoint, one that is celebrated in this novel.