A lawyer looks for the tiny rock of guilt in a sea of innocence. A lawyer looks for the tiny rock of innocence in a sea of guilt. That's their trade.'John Fraser has been described as 'the most original novelist of our time' by the Whitbread Award Winner and Book Prize nominee John Fuller. In Fraser's latest novel, after a convulsive war that rumbles on for thirty years a disparate group search amongst the metal skeletons, detritus and urban wreckage of a shattered land for a new life, a new start and some kind of normality.
The group, comprising therapists and entrepreneurs, including the novel's narrator - a cross between a mercenary and a pacifier - generate between them complicated and sometimes fantastic responses to the challenges facing them.
The war continues to reverberate, on an individual basis, but also in the wider context of economic recovery, religious radicalism, and commodity speculation.
Death and trauma continue, social and ideological cleavages deepen, but ultimately there is a hint that once the Thirty Years are up, the surviving characters may continue their lives back where it all began.
Thirty Years has echoes of the Thirty Years War, and of Brecht's Mother Courage. As Fraser's characters continue to commit crimes, financial and physical, the novel questions and reframes the essential issues of crime and punishment that have concerned humanity from the Bible and Koran, to Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and onwards into the future.
About the Author: John Fraser has lived in Rome since 1980. Previously, he worked in England and Canada.
The distinguished poet, novelist and Booker Prize nominee John Fuller has written of Fraser's fiction:
One of the most extraordinary publishing events of the past few years has been the rapid, indeed insistent, appearance of the novels of John Fraser. There are few parallels in literary history to this almost simultaneous and largely belated appearance of a mature oeuvre, sprung like Athena from Zeus's forehead; and the novels in themselves are extraordinary. I can think of nothing much like them in fiction. Fraser maintains a masterfully ironic distance from the extreme conditions in which his characters find themselves. There are strikingly beautiful descriptions, veiled allusions to rooted traditions, unlikely events half-glimpsed, abrupted narratives, surreal but somehow apposite social customs. Fraser's work is conceived on a heroic scale in terms both of its ideas and its situational metaphors. If he were to be filmed, it would need the combined talents of a Bunuel, a Gilliam, a Cameron.
Like Thomas Pynchon, whom in some ways he resembles, Fraser is a deep and serious fantasist, wildly inventive. The reader rides as on a switchback or luge of impetuous attention, with effects flashing by at virtuoso speeds. The characters seem to be unwitting agents of chaos, however much wise reflection the author bestows upon them. They move with shrugging self-assurance through circumstances as richly-detailed and as without reliable compass-points as a Chinese scroll.
I am convinced that he is the most original novelist of our time. His work has become an internal dialogue of intuitions and counter-intuitions that just happens to take the form of conversations between his inscrutable characters. But really it is a rich texture of poetic perceptions, frequently reaching for the aphoristic, but rooted in sidelong debate and weird analogies.
