The Dreaming Dragons: A Time Opera
Norstrilia Press, $12.95, 245 p., O 909106 07 X
Inside Ayers Rock
The epigraph to The Dreaming Dragons suggests that melodrama can accomplish ‘the articulation of the unsayable’.
Accordingly, this book evokes transpersonal consciousness through the medium of a gripping plot, whose effect of conveying ‘the unsayable’ is only heightened by the fact that the writer and his words sometimes seem at odds with one another. Thus, ‘the midday sun took barrenness into its fists and shook it’ is like Roger Zelazny impossibly faltering; and ‘wholly in the dimensions of tactual and haptic space’ involves adjectival tautology. Overall, the writing seems designed to make readers stand back (melodramatically), rather than to lead them into enlightenment.
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