Peana At'romond is a novel about the great divide, the complication that may be the after-life and our relationship with it and what we think it could be.
Through a damning gypsy's curse, a Scots-born female rogue, savage inexplicable accidents, murder and two of the oldest sexual dysfunctions known to civilisation, Peana At'romond chronicles a few months in the life and close family of a bewitching, heavily-pregnant, Cornish-bred herbalist, whose life is not entirely guiltless.
Besides a story, it is also a succession of events, lies, discussions and an unwholesome pointer to the mystery of what may lie in wait for us after we die: you can trust the chronicler or you can trust yourself.
Peana At'romond is a self-contained maze, a story of passion and determination involving poisoning, manslaughter, spiritualism, explosives and rage. But who is the narrator? What is his abhorrent secret and why is he so personally judgmental?
Its style is deliberately capricious. Since language is a living expression of thought and writing is a graphic expression of the same, in Peana At'romond, I have used words to form speed bumps and incursions, to introduce disinformation and to interrupt the normal smooth flow of consciousness. Yet, the story itself is lucid and manageable.
The intention, to a unconscious degree, is to introduce confusion; for the reader to feel there is something askew outside of the flat words on the paper, as well as reflecting the maze that is the main subject matter; the afterlife.
Trusting an author's use of words is paramount but here there is a deliberate lack of assurance. The sensation of the novel is abstract; to reflect the subject and therefore, distractions, untruths and deceptions abound throughout.
Words are deliberately and unusually used and placed in order to cause the readers world, not the world on the paper, to reel.
Read a sample here;
At the time of the accident, I mentioned that the lad's name was unimportant and there, I was wrong. The disappearance of a life, any life is a sad and distressing event and this became noticeably clearer to me as I heard the evidence, that whatever poignant existence the child may have had and whatever potential that could have existed, was now lost. Forever. Cathmor was in fact, a phenom, a sensation of his time. That he was not recognised as such is our undoing not his. He had a right to be. By his very existence, he had that right.
The flow of life, its seemingly arbitrary nature, gifted the world with a son and now he lay in the coldness of Grays mortuary, awaiting a final act by those who brought him to us. His mother, attending an inquest for the first time, wailed as the rule of law climaxed. But it was of no help. Her emasculated son, the eldest of three, her 'little monkey' with the crooked front teeth and slight bent nose, the result of a collision with a stout oak tree when he was five, was no more and the contrast between her paganism and the exposition of the law was equivocal but extremely questionable.
Cathmor McFadden. Genius, thief and child. RIP January 1923.