Saturday 15 May 2021

The English Assassin; A Romance Of Entropy.


 'Stuth, its a third collection of Jerry Cornelius related/ interconnected viginettes, just over half a dozen bewildering glimpses of catastrophy., with multiverses boiling away. People with familiar faces we can only witness the good, the bad and the sexy do good and bad things through a pinball machine of diminishing returns.the sands are running out for everyone involved but the time piece keeps being flipped. It is as close we get to a happy ending, or at least a series of less horrible ones. It seems the only thoroughly modern response to the apocalypse with do what thou wilt being the only universal law.

             There are other universal laws at play here beyond the unfolding entropy of the title. One best viewed through the lense of a Logopilitan observer, in the end entropy always wins, the "always" being our only bolt hole. the various story lines at play go some way to re-inforcing this notion. It only pays lip service to the laws of thermo dynamics as only the vey well dressed may do so. mind you, everything I think I know about entropy I learned in a 1981 episode of Doctor Who; Logopolis. A dazzling and melancholy tale of a race of mathematicians who try to hold the entropy and decay of the aging universe at bay using block transfer computations, the language of the universe (with a featured performance by the much missed and lovely John Frazer as the doomed Monitor as well as the even sadder last appearence of Tom Baker as the Doctor. I cannot look at a radar dish without thinking of my heroes demise.That alone should illustrate what a huge notion entropy as a threat is!)

              I can toss around Logopolitan memes like a ripe old mathmatician and convince a casual listener that I know what I am talking about. it is boobie-babble off course. Alas, I am not sure I could describe the life of Jerry Cornelius with the same degree of casuality. There are however some beautifully constructed vigenettes in this book which might go some way to almost doing that. My heart ached for the worlds that unfolded and then collapsed within the book, with touchingly familiar worlds crumbling to memory. with societies we thought would last forever just coming apart, just so much debris in the wake of catastrophy, the truth of history. A bullet from a gun that loves its victim.

              If only we could sing them back into being.