Note for Note: Another Pentateuch

In this daring exploration of primeval consciousness, Marcus Cornelius has seemingly managed to convey the unknowable. In an achievement of literary genius, he has given extraordinary expression to an inchoate time before history. The inspired prose flows with a richly dense imagery containing astonishingly eloquent passages that are demanding and uncompromising. One finishes Plough enlightened and changed, led to the deepest reaches of the psyche, to places in the self that are almost beyond the capacities of language. There is not a word out of place. A remarkable tour-de-force that will forever change how you read a book.

Book 1 (Plough) followed an exiled individuals search for inner coherence in an incoherent and violent world more than 1000 years ago. Book 2 (Growth) witnessed the establishment of a sustainable harmony between a community and the land upon which they had lived for three or four centuries but within and beyond which community were the seeds of its own decay. Book 3 (Harvest) shows a far more developed and structured society, which comprises several clear levels, from the rulers and the priesthood who impose order, through the artists, artisans, and peasants, down to the untouchables, the people of the mud, about whom it is forbidden to even speak. The story follows three main characters: Kimi, the principal courtesan of the ruler; Nohbul, the ferryman, and his family who had fallen from grace and seek to re-establish themselves in a state of grace; and Seth, a mute. The society comes under threat from external, and foreign, influences and from the volcano, The Blameless, in the shadow of which the society had evolved. The story is told on five levels, all but the final chapter having five parts. They each start with a section called The Names, on historical martyrs who are not well known, evidence of the lost tribes of Israel and the tribes of the Roma, who between them represent the two major diaspora in the history of human society. This is followed by a poem, and then the story of one of each of twenty-six masks which were part of the dome of a grand building buried perhaps centuries earlier, after a convulsion of the earth. There is then an Anecdote about events that may or may not concern residents of the society at the heart of the book, and, finally the story itself. Each of these levels can be read as a sequence in themselves or in the order in which they are presented in the book. Harvest takes place along the river which was a mountain spring in Book 1 and a vital stream in Book 2.