NOBODY TRUE - Book review

James Herbert’s 2003 novel Nobody True is another excursion into ‘life after death’ with a similar dark tone to his earlier book, Others (1999).

It begins intriguingly with the sentence ‘I wasn’t there when I died’ – which echoes his epigraph at the front of the book: ‘It’s not that I’m afraid to die. It’s just that I don’t want to be there when it happens – Woody Allen’.

As he grows up the narrator, James True, realises that he can induce an ‘out-of-body experience’. This is akin to remote viewing. Apparently, he was absent from his body when he was murdered in a hotel. He now finds himself a floating soul, able to fly and view but not able to touch or feel anything in a physical sense.

His back-story is interesting. He studied graphic art and went into advertising. In one of several footnotes he mentions those adverts which are so clever yet the brand name goes unnoticed. Herbert was writing from experience as he studied at Hornsey College of Art and went into advertising.  Eventually, True starts his own agency with his friend Oliver and marries Oliver’s ex-girlfriend Andrea, and they have a daughter Primrose. The firm and their marriage seem successful.

After about seven years of marriage, the city is alarmed by a vicious serial killer who, when we encounter him, proves quite terrifying. The killer is blamed for James True’s murder, apparently.

True has to take time to adjust to his new life as an invisible non-physical entity. Gradually, he gets on the trail of the killer. Along the way in this page-turning book there are many twists and turns, littered with broken trust, guilt and greed.

Herbert brings to the fore much of his esoteric knowledge about the supernatural, including Kirlian auras. Long before the end, James True is belaboured with dreadful and hurtful revelations, to the point where he asks, ‘Was nobody true to me?’ (p482).

Classic Herbert and with an ending as poignant yet strangely as uplifting as that of Others.

Editorial comment:

‘Andrea kept her voice low, only the gravity of its tone reaching Prim and I on the sofa’ (p158). Of course that should read ‘Prim and me’.

ON WINGS OF SONG - Book review

 

A strange book, this. Critically acclaimed yet a commercial failure, Thomas M Disch’s science fiction novel On Wings of Song won the 1980 John W Campbell memorial Award. It was published in 1979.

The first part relates Daniel Weinreb’s childhood in twenty-first century town of Amesville in Iowa, whose strict Christian Right regime of the Undergoders prohibits almost all music. ‘Why were people like that so bent on patrolling people’s most private thoughts?’ (p111).

With a friend he sneaked away and crossed the border to watch a musical movie. ‘This, then, was what it was all about. This, when it issued from within you, was the liberating power that all other powers feared and wished to extirpate: song. It seemed to Daniel that he could feel the music in the most secret recesses of his body, an ethereal surgeon that would rip his soul free from its crippling flesh’ (p31).

Daniel’s world changes when his minor rebellion – in the form of circulating a radical newspaper – condemns him to the local prison at Spirit Lake. He is fourteen. While here, he hears prisoners play music. ‘... there seemed to be this difference between the language of music and the language of words: it didn’t seem possible, in the language of music, to lie’ (p52). The prison is without bars – for each prisoner carries an electrically controlled explosive in his stomach (after a fashion, pre-empting the Rutger Hauer 1991 movie Wedlock).

Daniel, like many people, is aware that with the help of special apparatus providing some kind of feedback, the users can fly when they sing. In essence, the singer’s body stays fixed to the apparatus but the ‘soul’ – or referred to as the ‘fairy’ – floats away, something like remote viewing which was postulated and seemingly adopted by Ingo Swann in the early 1970s.  Daniel is captivated by this idea and is determined to learn to sing and then to fly...

Released from prison, he becomes friendly with Boadicea, the daughter of local tycoon Grandison Whiting, usually referred to as Boa. Inevitably, they fall in love. ‘... and felt himself to be, with her, ineffably, part of a single process that began in that faraway furnace that burned atoms into energy... the moment when he had felt needles of light piercing his and Boa’s separate flesh, knitting their bodies like two threads into the intricate skein of that summer’s profusions’ (p152).

National shortages – due to many factors including terrorism – affected the people in New York and elsewhere. Chris Moor's cover illustration depicts the decadent milieu Daniel is embroiled in. There’s a poignant episode where a body builder cannot obtain his proteins either legally or on the black market: as his muscles waste, he deteriorates and ‘he blew out his brains’ (p241).

A great deal of musical knowledge is displayed, notably operas. Eventually, Daniel does learn to sing. Bearing in mind that some aspects of the novel can be construed as a bitter satire, the ending is probably apt, though I didn’t like it.

As may be gleaned from the above quotations, Disch was also a poet. The writing is very good. Sadly, Disch suffered depression after the death of his life-partner Charles Naylor and about three years, in his New York apartment, later he shot himself. He was 68.

Editorial note:

‘The table was set and everyone was watching a panel discussion about the new fertilizers in the living room’ (p139). Presumably there were no fertilizers in the living room. This should read: ‘The table was set in the living room and everyone was watching a panel discussion about the new fertilizers’.

Writing – research – Nazis – psychic-04

For the final glimpse into the book PSYCHIC DISCOVERIES BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN by Sheila Ostrander & Lynn Schroeder (1970) this copy 1976, we’ll look at the Nazis and Hitler.

It’s already been mentioned (in psychic-01 here that Hitler was a believer in the occult. A good number of authors have mined this subject, among them Dennis Wheatley, Daniel Easterman, James Twining, Graham Masterton and James Herbert.

According to this book, Czechs said the Nazi movement was deeply involved with the black arts. Hitler was born in Braunau Inn in Austria, a town long famous for the large number of mediums it produced (including Willy Schneider, who had the same wet nurse as Hitler!)

Apparently, Hitler was trained in mediumship by Prof Haushofer of the University of Munich. (See The Morning of the Magicians).

One man who fought Nazism was Stefan Ossowiecki (1877-1944). He was a telepathist, clairvoyant, and could resort to astral projection. He helped the underground during the war, giving information on lost and imprisoned people. Holding a scrap of clothing, he was able to reveal where victims had been executed, and where they were buried.

Documented accounts speak of him locating specific bodies in mass graves layered with the dead.

On the day of Warsaw Uprising, he was killed by the Nazis; his body was never found, as he predicted.

***

From time to time, Tana Standish crossed paths with Nazis – bearing in mind that she was active in the 1970s and 1980s.

One nasty Nazi was Dr Wolf Schneider, who was born in 1920. He was responsible for torturing Tana in Czechoslovakia in 1975 (The Prague Papers). He didn’t employ black magic, just plain evil shock electric shock treatment. He was later recruited by Spetsnaz officer Aksakov in The Tehran Text mission.

Tana was not versed in astral projection, though she was learning to harness remote viewing - which is another subject worthy of comment in a later blog. Aided by recourse to bio-feedback, she used this in a haunting and poignant scene in The Tehran Text.

Tana Standish can be found in The Prague Papers and TheTehran Text.

The Tehran Text quiz - answers and winners

1.  Yazd is an ancient city in Iran. It’s featured in the book. What is Yazd famous for, apart from being one of the oldest cities, over 5,000 years in existence?

A. Home of Zoroastrianism. Silk production; badgirs – air conditioning/wind-catchers; the city itself has a fire temple which holds a fire that has been kept alight continuously since 470 AD.

Winner – Charles T. Whipple

2. Tana Standish employs remote viewing to locate a friend in Evin prison, Tehran. Did the US and UK governments test this paranormal ability, and if so when?

A. Yes, it started in earnest in 1975 but was wound up as being inconclusive in 1995.

Winner – Shani Struthers

3. At the time of Tana’s mission (1978), a Bulgarian journalist was assassinated with the help of KGB agents in London. Who was he and how was he killed?

A. Georgi Markov, an umbrella fired a ricin pellet into his leg and he subsequently died of poisoning.

Winner – Tim Taylor

The Tehran Text

 

Day after launch rankings:

 

Amazon UK =

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #23,156 Paid in Kindle Store    

• #42 in Kindle Store > Books > Crime, Thriller & Mystery > Suspense > Political
• #70 in Books > Crime, Thrillers & Mystery > Political

 

Amazon COM =

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #141,169 Paid in Kindle Store    

• #58 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers & Suspense > Supernatural > Psychics
•  

Thanks to everyone who has purchased this e-book, the sequel to The Prague Papers.

The Tehran Text quiz-02

An e-book of THE TEHRAN TEXT can be won. Specify preference: Pdf or Mobi version. Please respond by comment here or via FB PM.

 

2. Tana Standish employs remote viewing to locate a friend in Evin prison, Tehran.

Did the US and UK governments test this paranormal ability, and if so when?