That last sentence is a wonder: a moment of transcendent transition captured in a handful of words that nevertheless manage to convey extremes wide enough to span life and death, being and nothingness. Pure magic. It reminds me of another great quote a dozen or so pages later:On page 13, Bakker wrote:His father sang into the tumbling world--a Metagnostic Cant of Translocation, Kelmomas realized. Sorcery scooped him whole, then cast him as grains across the face of nowhere. Light lanced through the sound of clacking thunder. Crashing, crushing darkness became the miracle of sky.
On page 28, Bakker wrote: It made her all the more accursed and inhuman, spearing matters to the pith with but a single breath.
While Bakker is neither accursed nor inhuman, he can certainly spear matters with a single breath! But here we also have an example of one of his habitual phrases that is starting to bug me the more often he uses it. "... all the more...". Just a few paragraphs up on that page, a sound was "all the more titanic for the tremulous keen that had preceded it."
Perhaps this wouldn't have bugged me so much if he hadn't appeared mere sentences after his other habitual phrase that is starting to bug me, " ... not so much as ..." For instance:
And:On pages 27-28, Bakker wrote:The purple cleft that was her eye did not so much as obscure her beauty as shout her complicity.
And:On page 22, Bakker wrote: A dead peashrub branch jutted from the intervening ground, forks dividing the orange image of his father not so much into pieces as possibilities.
Maybe it's just a pet peeve of mine and doesn't bother anyone else. When I first started reading Bakker, I thought these phrases were convenient, pithy ways of making points and comparisons. But they stand out, well, all the more with increasing frequency of use.On page 30, Bakker wrote:He screamed, no so much for the sum of his torment as for its division ...
I'm also torn between his interjections of wisdom at the beginning of so many scenes. My conflict arises from the beauty and penetration of his insight, pitted against a frequency of use that increasingly turns these interjections into obligatory writer's gimmicks. Most of them truly are profound ... but there are so many of them. I'm in awe of his ability to come up with them, but at the same time doubtful that so many are needed.
For instance, the paragraphs beginning with:
Each of these begins an entire paragraph worth of musing into matters that little affect the story, but merely show off how smart Bakker is. The very thing that makes Bakker's writing so unique and praiseworthy is starting to become the thing that takes me out of the story, gratuitously revealing the artist's hand.To be desolate is to be of a piece with things inanimate ... (page 22)
There was a serenity in confusion when it was profound ... (25)
To be human was to be bound, aye, to suffer what one was, always ... (28 )
Everything we say to one another, we also say to souls absent. We continually speak to the speech that comes after our voice ... (29)
But maybe Bakker is aware of this. After all, he writes:
On page 31, Bakker wrote:Like all artists, they were loathe to forego all visible signs of their labors.