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It explores Bayliss's wide-ranging interests including theater, systems, engineering, financial webs, liturgy, railroads, geography, and politics - as well as the challenges of friendship, love, sex, art, and work. The setting is "Dogtown" on "Cape Gloucester" in the s. The tetralogy is headed by Prologos and includes the trilogy Gloucesterbook , Gloucestertide , and Gloucestermas The novels may be read in any order.
The Left Hand of Darkness. The Chambers Crossword Dictionary, 3rd edition. How Happy Became Homosexual. Paved with Good Intentions. Quotations From Mark Twain. The Last Books of H. Fortune Telling By Cards. Selected Poems of Lawrence Durrell. A Fugitive Covers His Tracks. Posthumous Papers of a Living Author. In Time Like Air. The Diaries of Adam and Eve. Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip.
Extracts From Adam's and Eve's Diary. The Mark on the Wall. The Lost Art of Losing. The Hot Gates and other occasional pieces.
Why Go to College? The Discovery of the Future. Simple Tea Leaf Divination. The Man in Asbestos: An Allegory of the Future. Extracts from Adam's Diary, translated from the original ms. The Philosophy of Benjamin Disraeli.
Sunday After the War. Christian Reading Companion for 50 Classics. Courtship - Some Practical Advice. The Old Apple Dealer. While the ruminations of the main characters, including an omniscient narrator, occupy most of the book, there is a curious kind of in-breeding among leads as their ruminations usually center around the same subject, such as the search for a father for Caleb Karcist on the part of his friends. Caleb, for his part, is mildly amused. Roughly the book breaks down into two orbits, the first concerns Mary Tremont also known as Moira Trevisa , Caleb's mother.
Around the celebration of Dogwood's annual Petrine read Roman Catholic celebration, Moira, as she was then known, had sex with three distinguished gentlemen who were respectively a successful acquirer of stocks who happens to be a Jew; a young officer in the U. Navy who is a blonde Celtic navy architect; and a soon-to-be ordained Tudor read Episcopalian priest who is something of a "holy ghost" with radical ideas about changing ecclesiastical rituals.
Editorial Reviews. Review. "What is the American novel going to look like when it grows up? Gloucestertide (Gloucesterman) by [Bayliss, Jonathan]. www.farmersmarketmusic.com: Gloucestertide (Gloucesterman series): Ships with Tracking Number! INTERNATIONAL WORLDWIDE Shipping available. May not contain.
Why this question of fatherhood should be of such concern to Tessa Opsimath is a mystery, but, suffice it to say, she likes to solve the scandals of an associate who was born a bastard. For myself I regard Tessa as a tiresome busybody.
At any rate she was a disciple of Auto Drang Otto Rank a prominent psychoanalyst and is, therefore, adept at probing hidden secrets. Tessa believes in "free will," and, supposedly, so did her mentor Auto Drang. Readers are advised to be on the alert for those occasions when it pokes its nose through the canvas. Aside from Caleb, an introspective and scrawny bachelor with a penchant for geometric symbols, who is engaged in completing a dramatic version of the Sumerian tale of Gilgamesh, the two main characters that take up the bulk of the novel are Fayaway [Morgan] Gabriel and Finn Macdane.
Their common topic of conversation in their pillow talk is Caleb. Midway in the novel all three of Caleb's possible fathers die and the story line shifts to Caleb's position as an assistant to the mayor of Dogwood. By applying this theory to the solution of practical problems he has become an efficiency expert who can expedite work, reduce expenditures, and get rid of surplus employees. As the novel takes place during the years Roland Raygun Ronald Reagan was president, an era in which personal selfishness overcame aspirations for "the common good" Caleb does not grasp the importance of personal computers which were to make OHM punch cards obsolete..
Not surprisingly Caleb's reorganization schemes are not regarded with joy by corporate vice presidents or by legislators whose political futures are tied to special interests.
Gloucestermas is not for everyone. Since I am a transported native of Gloucester, Mass. I am able to locate most of the sites Bayliss describes, though in some cases I think he puts separate scenes into one place. A map of Dogtown would do much to clear up the confusion. I found the artificial names to be unnecessary though Bayliss may have thought his cognomens were cute, significant, or just inside jokes.
His description of the inner harbor and the shoreline of Gloucester's downtown as seen from the Crow Eastern Point breakwater does not correspond to anything I saw from the same place, though Bayliss, as all-knowing narrator, says he used binoculars. At one point before his accidental death by a kilroy in this case a refrigeration trailer , Ibi Roy, a mythological dog in earlier books, charges a sign with a picture of a cat on it. I find this to be unbelievable. Bayliss has a curious way of trying to link Wellingborough Redburn Herman Melville to the narrative which I find difficult to accept.
Most of this linkage is through the reminiscences or experience of anyone of the interchangeable characters. I prefer to call Liam Yeats by his real name. For most of the novel, William Butler Yeats was used as a prop without reference to his works; however, in a penultimate chapter an attempt is made to show how Yeat's use of geometric symbols was not as abstruse or as profound as those Caleb uses.
Three cheers then for the "Isorectotetrahedron" IRTH and the double-headed axe, which date from Sumerian times and, as far as I can see, appear to have the same functions as a scepter and mace.
As poetry, what Yeats did with his tower symbol, nature images, and personal conflicts, and with the attitudes of the oppressed people in Ireland were on a plane higher than the more prosaic Bayliss ever reaches. When he was not trying to be the conveyor of Universal Systems or a sub-optimizer of optimum ideas, I am sure Bayliss, or his fictional alter ego Caleb, was aware of this. Another writer Bayliss makes much use of without explaining why is George Borrow, an unjustly-neglected 19th century writer of picaresque novels and translator of the English Bible, who along with Bayliss was of the Tudor Episcopalian persuasion and had a fondness for real gypsies a name Bayliss attaches to free-loving female waifs.
Bayliss abandons his staggering vocabulary, mostly made up of sesquipedalians of his own coinage, and his equally staggering collections of lists as he gets deeper into his novel. Could it be that these stylistic extravagances became as boring to the author as they eventually became to his readers? As a Gloucester native, I appreciated Bayliss description of the changing tides as they affected the creek on the south side of Little Harbor Good Harbor Beach but I am not sure the description would mean much to outsiders, particularly to those who could not picture the scene he describes it in detail.
As incoming and outgoing tides changed the contours of the land and the transparency of the water, so the many shifts in the novel changed the outlines of the plot. In this sense, if one is looking for metaphors the creek and its waters could serve as a metaphor for the fluid nature of the novel, perhaps, not as explicit as the madeleine in Proust, but a metaphor nonetheless.
If the epic of Gilgamesh appeals to readers, I would recommend reading it as a whole rather than in the dispersed sections in the novel. Caleb uses the original as a source but adds ideas that came later in the history of civilization. His updated version is acceptable because it deals revealingly with the world in which many of us find ourselves, without all those bothersome gods who require perpetual sacrifice.
If there is a parallel between this lesser story and the greater story of Caleb perhaps it can be found in librarian Gloria Cotton's observation that Caleb is Gilgamesh and Ibi Roy, his Viking Shepherd dog, is Engidu, the wild man Gilgamesh subdued and, came to love. After Engidu died Gilgamesh set off on his quest for immortality, only to find that his only immortality would be in the guise of legend. I think that if the reader has the stamina to get to the end of Gloucestermas, Bayliss' pondurables, no matter how many avatars he uses to illustrate them, trouble most of humanity.
Is life more than "birth, copulation and death"? I suspect Bayliss solution is a kind of oscillating pessimism, well to the shoreward side of despondency. He has no faith in God, yet God or Gods exist. He is comfortable being a Tudor Episcopalian because he likes liturgy, but he concedes liturgy has its roots in primitive rituals, dances and choral recitatives. I think, like bigoted George Borrow, he finds Roman Catholicism to be distasteful because of its "priest-craft" and he excludes traces of it in his novel, going so far as to place his characters in Mother's Rocky Neck when the greater number of tourists and Petrine residents in Dogwood are celebrating their quasi-religious festivities on Sacrum Square, the town landing, on the other side of the inner harbor..
Despite occasional touches of brilliance as in the playful analogy of a schooner to a battleship; in the casual exchange of pleasantries between Caleb and Lillian Cloud-Argo, his lady love of yesteryear, at the Starboard Gangway Studio without a kiss for Old Times' sake; in the vivid but all too brief description of the wrecking of the poorly-maintained year old schooner Gloucesterman and the drowning of its helmsman Finn Macdane; and in the surprisingly lively dialogue between Caleb and Thalia, his godmother's daughter, in the final chapter.
Gloucestermas is a circumlocutious and repetitious book that ends on a note of middle-age florescence. Caleb is 46 and Thalia is 45; not quite the mature fascination of Antony at 53 and Cleopatra at 39, but close enough. Get to Know Us. Delivery and Returns see our delivery rates and policies thinking of returning an item? See our Returns Policy. Visit our Help Pages. Audible Download Audio Books. Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands. Amazon Prime Music Stream millions of songs, ad-free.