BtZ42 pages 116-121 The Fire of Paradise

[Joseph Tracy]

I see the candies as the terrible and weirdly hilarious difference between the thing being advertised and the thing as experienced, tasted, consumed. The essence of a great deal of satire.  
The Fire of Paradise is the most loaded with contradictory mythic imagery, and inasmuch as this section can be read as a bawdy fairy tale, the final test before the pleasures of Darlene.

To get a bit weird  and risk stretching the metaphor, there seems to be several references in describing the candies to a combination of exoticism and the chemistry of war.  To me this suggests British colonialism: exotic consumption fueled by the technology of war. Do human appetites get weirdly nasty when their satisfaction is tied to, say, cruelty, theft, destruction. Maybe the hand of the King in Mrs’ Quoad’s dream is meant to be ambivalent in a similar way.  

> On Jul 1, 2016, at 7:31 AM, Eileen Pierce <eileenpierce333 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Please help me understand more about The Fire of Paradise and where a person might find it.
> 
> “resembling the descriptions of poison and debilitating gases found in training manuals”
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> “Inner rooms and older faces developing under light falling through a skylight, yellower, later in the year . . . . ‘  (and why four ellipses here, not three?)
> 
> Thank you so much, I so enjoy reading your posts.  You make reading GR even more fun!
> 
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