But what did that tell him, or us, about their status among the people for whom they were intended? Were they to be found in such numbers because the Left Hand of God trilogy (as he called it – none of the title pages have so far been discovered) was considered one of the great artistic treasures of this lost civilization? In short, was the author the equivalent of our own giants – a Bramley or Ginsmeyer – or was he an Allin Harwood or Jinna Lorenzo, widely read and as widely derided? Or was he a deluded self-publisher whose books went straight from the printing press into his attic and from there directly to the rubbish tip en masse without selling a copy to anyone other than a luckless friend or relative?
As such, completely shorn of any context, either historical or aesthetic, these books set us an interesting challenge. For now we must make something of them, good or bad, only through a simple and direct reading unmediated by accumulated layers of cultural status. If we fail to be moved and stimulated, are we rejecting a work once considered by its readers to be of sublime quality? And if we are stirred, are we being stimulated by a book so worthless its contemporaries thought it only fit to be thrown away? Other central questions remain, of the sort we can usually take for granted in order to tell us what to think about what we are about to read. Is it some kind of historical fiction? Is it a contemporary work describing recent events? Is it entirely imaginary? Did the Redeemers exist in fact, or are they merely the product of an unhealthy imagination, or is their presentation merely propaganda written by someone belonging to an opposing cult? Are the characters based on real individuals and as such would have been known to their audience or are they entirely inventions of the writer? Are the many differences in style to be explained by the erratic nature of the writing or are these references to known works that the reader would have recognized, or are they just thefts? Was it written by more than one person? Or none of the above? Only one of these questions, concerning the Materazzi and the Redeemers, has already been partly answered (see below 1#). We must accept we may never know how to read these texts accurately.
Mr Fahrenheit attempted to solve these problems by the simple expedient of ignoring them. He published the first two books in the series as if they were contemporary examples of the genre usually described as ‘fantasy’ – though lacking as they do any dwarfs, fairies, monsters or elves it’s not easy to understand why. Be that as it may, the books published under the family name of Fahrenheit’s mother were reasonably successful in commercial terms, if found odd by many and distinctly disliked by others. The translation, though racy and free, cannot be said to be inaccurate.
The Unified Nations have now legally taken control of the site called by the Habiru the Field of Books but popularly known as the Rubbish Tips of Paradise after a newspaper headline more concerned with a memorable phrase than any degree of accuracy (the rubbish tips are east of the fabled Eden by some two hundred miles). The ‘ownership’ of the text of the Left Hand of God trilogy is subject to legal appeal between UNAS and Fahrenheit and the Habiru. Following Mr Fahrenheit’s committal under the Mental Health Act to a care facility in Cambria, an agreement has been reached to publish the third volume, The Beating of His Wings, in a translation by Fahrenheit where the profits are paid directly to the Habiru. In due course, and in the light of the extensive research on the documents being uncovered by UNAS, a proper academic translation will be published to include footnotes and a detailed analysis of the historical context as well as a professional commentary.
We can hardly fail to hope that, as more material is uncovered in the Rubbish Tips of Paradise (as we are now more or less obliged to call them), we will discover many great masterpieces of our hidden past. Who can say what shocks and delights are to come?
Doctor Professeur Ajax Plowman
42nd of Brumaire AD 143. 812
1# Since it details an event mentioned frequently in the trilogy, I refer those interested to the first proper academic paper by UNAS based on translated documents from the Rubbish Tips of Paradise: ‘The Praxis of Aggression: Historical Verification for the Battle of Silbury Hill and the Decline of the Materazzi Hegemony’, History Today, vol 277, pp. 62–120.
APPENDIX ii
Some of the following statement by Paul Fahrenheit has been redacted under the laws of criminal libel and several statutes of Unified Nations Hate Crime legislation.
Concerning the self-serving propaganda of the Unified Nations Archaeological Survey (UNARSE), the
Furthermore,
What could be drearier once you have learned the basics of thinking and reading than to carry on living in an intellectual nursery with someone telling you what toys to choose and why. ‘This is a nice toy, little boy or little girl, but not that one – it does not meet with our view of toyness.’ And what could be more foolish than to see the world through the eyes of most of the commentariat: the teacher, the academic, the cultural commentator, the critic, the massed ranks of opinion-formers who clog up our world like