'Daemon Est Deus Inversus'

D.P. Watt's contribution to The Far Tower: Stories for W.B. Yeats stands in marked contrast to Ron Weighell's tale (see blog post below) of obscure manuscripts and mystic dreams. Watt's protagonist is the black sheep of an old army family, a man who spends his life in jail or committing crimes that will get him another spell in chokey. He seems to be a worthless individual, someone with nothing to contribute and who will die unmourned. Yet one act of compassion introduces him to a new world, one of the strange, visionary experiences in which (among other things) ordinary people's faces are transformed into luminous silver masks.

The nameless narrator steals a woman's purse by playing on her innocent kindness. Then he discovers that her husband and child are dead, and that he had dropped her in it financially. He returns the purse, anonymously. Unguessed of depths of compassion are revealed, along with it a desire to know more of his own family. This quest leads to the discovery of tapes and journals that offer a strange, numinous perspective on some of Britain's wars, including the suppression of the Easter Rising in 1916 and the Falklands in 1982. Without going into details, I was reminded of the film The Man Who Saw God, which dealt with a British soldier's religious experience during the post-war conflict in Cyprus.

There is a reference to Machen's Angel of Mons, of course. While the author acknowledges that it was simply a work of fiction, the implication is being that there is a deeper truth to found in the way the story caught the imagination. The narrator's life is transformed by dreams of wondrous beings. Far from a crook returning to the straight and narrow, he becomes a somewhat Blakeian figure, a beggar who struggles to at might communicate the epiphany he has experienced, a sort of modern Tom O'Bedlam.

Watt sets himself a hard task but, I think, his prose rises to the occasion. 'Each day I am assailed by thunder, scourged by rain, scorched by sun and thrashed by wind. It is my penance for my past and payment for my future - for the night of monstrous wonders to come.'

With luck I'll have another story read by the weekend. I don't think it would be sensible to go through this remarkable book too quickly.