Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Novel Jacket blurb
Woolly Visions
This forceful novel explores the ambiguous fears of bleeding hearts abroad, illuminating the scandalous distance between the ideas of academics and how the world is run.
The star of the story is 27-year-old Koko Valentine, a roving student on the run from love and comfort. He is jerked from his blind routine during a mass protest against high gas prices in Indonesia, when he meets Pram and Budi, two quick-learning bus drivers whose astute yet simple observations set in motion a botched plan to end a new kind of terrorism.
As a perpetual voice of neutrality, Koko is torn between the arguments of powerful men and women who can’t agree on how to make the world and humanity flourish. One the one side are the Death Consultants who argue that by mass marketing implements of destruction like motor vehicles and weaponry, the worst elements of humanity can be eliminated, allowing the rest to flourish. On the other side, plain language consultants argue for behaviour-shaping education of the masses. In the middle Koko is falling in love with a Danish children’s novelist and being seduced by a radical Indonesian eco-activist.
Prodding more intensely into his new lover’s ideas and character, Koko unveils the authenticity of his own mind. This is a novel that abolishes the pretense that knowledge leads to action, pulls back the curtain covering our power structures, and ultimately exposes the reedy streak separating progressives and war-hawks.
Finally, Koko is distorted by the trap he chooses to enter. Readers too may fail to recover from the power of Benjamin’s words.
Labels: 2002, Fiction, Toronto, Woolly Visions
