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I thought his reprisal painting with himself as an old man was a kind of fun, reverse Dorian Gray moment.
Sorry my thoughts on these are so shallow.
I get the feeling there’s a lot here for me to scratch at under the surface, and I delight in that kind of exploration of a book. I’ve just been exhausted from work, so I’ve kind of floated from island to island without much critical thinking.
I do see themes here such as those mentioned in the review of Priest’s other book, and I see them in Priest’s earlier novel The Affirmation, but I haven’t had the energy to think about them in a coherent way.
I am interested in continuing, and maybe work will let up a bit and give me time to engage in the conversation.
> "Without the internet I don’t know what I would do”
>
> Why did I think there was no Internet in the archipelago?
It's one of the little incongruous points that nags at me... how can there be a global Internet but no ability to map the world reliably? Even if for some reason aerial mapping was physically impossible, you'd think someone would have worked out how far apart things were just by pinging data around and timing the responses?
More widely, it intrigues me that we have so far met no kind of origin stories as to how people a) got to the world and b) spread out amongst the islands. I don't recall either folk tales, myths, or scientific dispersion theories aa yet (though these could easily be lying in wait later). I have a sense of a deep incuriousness about the remote past.
If these are stories told by Islanders for Islanders, why should such origin stories be there? How often do the Norman Conquest and the Danelaw come up in everyday conversations in Britain? Yes, there are references to "Blitz spirit" and "Keep calm and carry on", but those have more to do with jingoism than origins.
Maybe... and maybe I just find stuff about origins because I look for it. But I don't think it's just for islanders - in our world, at least. If you go to the Isles of Scilly, it's hard to avoid seeing things about the inhabitants in ancient times, and what the coastline looked like when the Romans were around, etc. And it's not hard to find books describing a more romantic and/or spiritualised version of how the islands came to emerge from the sea.
Likewise when I went to Madeira a few years back, almost the first thing you see when you land by boat is a very impressive statue symbolising Lady Madeira emerging in fire out of the water. And pretty much the second thing is a bunch of statues of the Spanish and Portuguese sea captains who had discovered, claimed, and then settled the islands. And the guide books are full of all that.
None of that seems to be present in The Islanders - hence my comment of "deep incuriousness" about such things. There have been a few mentions of indigenous inhabitants (or the lack thereof) but with no attempt at explanations of who / where / when / why. The gazetteer has, so far at least, been focused on the artistic world (in the wide sense, I mean, not just picture painters) with only passing concern with any other aspect of the history of the islands. Which is not a complaint on my part, simply an observation - maybe the gazetteer was intended to be circulated in art galleries, playhouses and the like, and not for a random tourist who just wants to travel?
How did the Seignior get his hands on a thryme so quickly? 18 generations is `175 years. I doubt very much one was flown in. I also doubt thrymes had been discovered yet. The science and technology in that chapter seemed quite modern. One of those flexible time thingies in operation? Really?
This chapter was useless. It could have been replaced by a single comment in the 'confession' chapter.
This reminds me of an old Bob Newhart telephone bit except not funny. Kammeston looks like an ass, and Kaine looks like an idiot. This fascination with Caurer is looking silly.
More proof that the people of the northern continent are evil and vile.
Bathurst is a Marty Stu. We now have established this firmly, which before was only suspected. He is more handsome, with a magnetic personality, amazingly sexy, and more talented a painter than all the Italian renaissance rolled into one. He apparently was injected with ever-so-much-more-so in the womb.
What is missing so far is some reason why we should care.
They are all artists and scientists and something in between.
I said that above. That is what I took away.
I have no idea what he is telling us, except more proof of the nastiness of the north.
I don't think so. Bathurst seems to have weaknesses, though he's probably oblivious to them. And all we know about how great he is is what's written in this guidebook - the same guidebook that described KERRITH SINGTON as a 'vicious killer' in one entry, despite showing us he was far from that elsewhere. Maybe he's the Archipelago's Wilt Chamberlain of Painting, but I don't think he's anything more than that.