Among other things, her book is in itself an attempt to challenge the encoding that we practice in our encounters with reality and even in the writing of fiction. This attempt takes on many forms. It appears as strands of narrative connected in odd ways. Seeing in an old way overtly evident in this time as if the earlier construction of seeing were naive though regarded by one as real and as consistent in this time is silent reading. The narrator concludes that our inability to see makes us prone to being manipulated into brutality and callousness by corporations, politicians and journalists, who use language to create the reality of their choice.
Riddles engage the mind.
Unavoidably the reader tries to understand the occurrences in the book what character is looking for work, or being made love to, or killed, and by whom or to determine the references to the world outside, examples being the Vietnam and Gulf wars, our inner cities, Daniel Defoe, the homeless, comic books and the detective story. At the same time, and this is one of the fascinating things about Defoe, these mental processes are opposed by the visual and dreamlike aspects of the text, which lend it a hypnotic quality. The desert, moon and sun, bodies of water, flights of swans, figures in black robes with eyeholes, are recurrent images lyrically rendered. Read slowly, without using the mind is one of the book s instructions, and it is tempting to follow it. The hennaed man alive for only an instant, who s never been alive is it.