The Garter from V to AD

[Michael Bailey]

...your point's well taken.  My evidence isn't very strong.  I think
that Satin displays the attitude that might cause him to intervene,
and he's close enough to the action to do so.  If she didn't wear the
safety device, someone must've crafted another - the German who made
the automatons?

I suspect that no amount of reading will uncover the exact methods!

My original thought while reading AtD was that the revelation of the
dancer's survival indicated a development of thought:

specifically: the choice of salient points in V. was in favor of
depicting elitist actors in prestigious vectors, and concomitant
notions: art (Jarretiere), science (Mondaugen), explorers (Godolphin),
poets (Maijstral on Malta), diplomat/spies (Malta in 1919) -- at each
point exploring the falling-through or decadence of each discipline to
"the horror" capsulized in "Vheissu"...

all this set against Paola's miraculous medal and willingness to
forgive as the redemptive principle missing from V.'s life?  something
like that...


Whereas, AtD, being a more-developed excursion through perhaps a
similar terrain, though with different methods and emphases - and
commenting on many things including the earlier work -

(so that Lake's long exercise of forgiveness fails to achieve the
redemption of Deuce, a-and there isn't a tangible symbol like a
miraculous medal (wait, I think there's one in there somewhere...???)
but an equally potent (and equally fragile and easy to underrate as
being insufficient to bring about the immense redemption needed...)
bright spot is the candle Webb's ghost bears in Reef's dream in the
ghostly parade - o when those saints of labor go marching in...

(and the salient points in AtD aren't as easily placed under a single
heading, even one so general as "elitist activity", but instead they
have several organizing principles, such as:

- Kieselguhr action: lumpen and violence-prone labor struggles,

- the Chums' demonstrated ability thru discipline, camaraderie and
intellect to literally rise above the fray

- The various attributes of the Vibe family and its influence upon,
position in, and understanding of the world

- the interplay of science and commerce and stage magic in the Merle thread

- the interplay of reality and fiction throughout

(all of which make it a more complex and richer novel, grappling with
the world at more interfaces, and (I'd say) more satisfyingly than V.,
although V.'s still a heckuva yarn...)

- and this large tapestry of AtD not only afforded an opportunity to
redress a characteristic of the earlier narrative that no longer
seemed as fit as it had before (specifically, the homophobia implicit
in J's suicide? inspired as it looks to've been by V.'s
attentions....), but also to redress the lingering sadness engendered
by J's demise, to step back from proclaiming the destructiveness or
failure-in-redemption of artistic endeavors and thereby lumping them
in with the decadence abounding in V. (thus placing dance and
surrealism in the labor parade lit by Webb's candle), and perhaps even
to subtly allude to the many "faked-death" stories that now and then
crop up for popular delectation?