Sunday 8 June 2008

In which the author is maddeningly cryptic

Earlier on today I posted up a book review which I was excited to share, because it had so freaked me out that I could hardly believe what I had discovered. Why had no-one else seen it before? I took the post down later on the advice of a trusted confidante.
‘Don’t put that on your blog!’ she gasped. ‘Someone’ll steal it! There’s a book in this, and you mustn’t tell anyone about it! I’ve got my Gypsy intuition going on this one - take it down now!’
So I did. I shall have to be mysterious, then, but it is an absolute stunner. I’ve found evidence, incontrovertable, though very subtly tucked away, that a classic, much-loved novel will have to be radically reinterpreted. So radically, in fact, that it will not only never be seen in the same way again, but it will turn from being a charming comedy into... something almost scary.
It’s as though... well, imagine you’d been leafing through The Wind in the Willows and wondered, in passing, why you had never previously noticed that Ratty lives on a canal and not a river, but you let that go and read on. Then, say in the chapter entitled “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”, you spot a reference to “the twin moons”, and then see the sun described as “a twinkling star in the red sky.” Then you flick to the front and see a note on the fly-leaf that somehow you had never bothered to read before - that nobody has ever bothered to read, apparently. It says: “This story takes place on the Planet Mars”.
That’s not what I’ve stumbled on, incidentally. Ratty, Toad and Mole are still safely on Terra Firma, but that is the scale of the thing we’re talking about. The book in question is that well known and this is every bit as big a rethink as the one I have just described. With luck, all will be revealed in due course!

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