GR P1 S1: "The Evacuation still proceeds..."

[jporter]

Yes, I think so, but more. There is the double meaning for
"Evacuation", as there must always be, given the guaranteed
mortality of any one. All roads lead to heaven. And yes, this
"visitation" or channeling is definitely during Pirate's off-time-
the agony of the death camps is precisely what They would
prefer that Pirate use his abilities to keep busy bureaucrats
from troubling about. There's a war to run, after all. Unless his
assignment this time is to experience the horror for some
functionary who stumbled upon the secret reports of the death
camps, by this time flooding out of the Zone, so as not to be
troubled by a guilty conscience for allocating resources towards
capturing Nazi scientists, rather than attempting to liberate the
camps straight off.

The poor soul that Pirate is channeling feels guilty. His
evacuation passes through "ruinous secret cities of the
poor, places whose 'names he has never heard...' " There
is a sense that he has lived a different life, that he was one
of those "VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows
speeding through the city..." or, their chauffeur ("half-silvered
images in a view finder"). Close, but no cigar?

Guilty and deserving of this fate, nonetheless, is the sense
I'm picking up, and it tends to universalize this evacuation,
or personalize it, if you like, w/r/t Pirate's subconscious.

jody


On Oct 24, 2005, at 6:14 PM, jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> ... pp. 3-7, coupla weeks
>
> Pirate's dream of the Evacuation which opens the novel is not just any 
> normal dream, and it's not just about the evacuations from London 
> which were happening in 1944, though that provides the pretext. 
> Pirate's "talent" for getting into the thoughts and fantasies of 
> others means that he has "seen" what's going on in the Nazi death 
> camps too, and has empathised with the prisoners on the transports. 
> While he has been able to manage his telepathic skill over the years, 
> it is in dream, where his conscious mind and psychological defence 
> mechanisms are in abeyance, that the true horror of the Nazi 'Final 
> Solution' is dredged up from within his subconscious, manifesting in 
> imagery and dialogue. Pirate's surreal dreamscape which opens the 
> novel is triggered by the evacuations which were going on in London at 
> the time, because these are a reminder to him, or to his conscience, 
> of the "evacuations" which have been going on in Germany since the 
> late 1930s.
>
> best
>