Contemporary Fiction
A Fabrication of Gold by John Moat
Price: £10.50 (Including Delivery, UK Only)
ISBN 978-0-9568735-0-7
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(**** For Readers’ Reviews, see below)
As with all John Moat’s books A Fabrication of Gold is expertly crafted: what the author has called “an alchemical Whitehall farce” succeeds in being by turn hilarious, lyrical and profound.
A Fabrication of Gold runs with an episode of apparent small-town
‘male-menopause’ – and it really shouldn’t be this funny – only to
discover that for all the derangement, and thanks to the intervention
of some seriously dodgy characters, the breakdown becomes a
breakthrough and leads to clarity and ultimate integration.
A feat of adroit story-telling… those who so far have ridden its white
water have made it to the end in one compelling trip. The book is
“unputdownable”.
“Remarkable – a completely new genre somewhere between
Shakespeare and Self-help. At the same time, it is a magnificent take
on The Great Work.” – Patrick Harpur, author of A Complete Guide
to the Soul.
“There is so much I love about this book. For all its apparently
recondite alchemical references, John Moat has the good sense to
identify and go with the humour of a profoundly serious process and
to do so jubilantly.” – Lindsay Clarke, author of The Chymical Wedding
and The Water Theatre.
Alchemical At Heart
Linda Proud says it takes a good man to write a good book.
John Moat is perhaps better known to readers of Resurgence as that wry observer of the passing world, Didymus. Behind the pseudonym lies an artist and writer, born in india but long domiciled in Devon, who founded the Arvon Foundation in 1968 with John Fairfax. By his own admission, he lies outside the mainstream, and what a relief that is, for his voice is fresh, original and, most important of all, honest.
Many writers can beguile us with their clever, even inspired use of language, but the test of a book is what it leaves us with. Is it just the vauge notion that we have been entertained for a few hours? Such novels are merely pastimes. Good for commuting with. The best books, however, arise from a kind of disembowelling of the imagination: where the author is determined and courageous enough to demand the truth of his inner self and then to set it down. Such books have real substance and leave us better than they found us. This is one of them.
I understand that John ‘dashed it off’ and that he was surprised when Lorna Howarth, former Editor of Resurgence, chose it to be the first publication in her fledgling publishing house, The Write Factor. He thought of it as a trifle, something he threw out betwixt and between. But when did the Muse ever spend years rewriting and editing? An energetic spurt of creativity that needs little reworking is an authentic sign of her influence.
Like so many of John’s works, A Fabrication of Gold is alchemical at heart. It is divided into eight books of 144 (very short) chapters. For those familiar with alchemy there is a whole rich seam of concealed symbolism and meaning, although the book is perfectly enjoyable without any background knowledge (or prior reading of C G Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy).
A dream work, following dream logic, as the story becomes increasingly bizarre you just go with it. It portrays the fuddled reality of a man who, in the middle of his life, believes his conservatory business is folding and that his wife is having an affair. It begins with a shadowy figure he calls ‘Caruso’ commissioning a conservatory covered in gold leaf, but what should be the end of his troubles only exacerbates them: where can he find someone who does gold leaf? Well, Dennis will know, Dennis the leatherworker who has just moved into the village and who has a passion for daughter Annabel; Dennis who, he is convinced, is replacing him in his wife’s affections. The gold leaf man turns out to be an alchemist called Cornelius who soon beomes as shadowy as Caruso.
Our (nameless) hero goes to a wise woman for help. She is called SM, which – as a note at the beginning helpfully tells us – stands for Soror Mystica. Not that the other SM is entirely absent as he returns to her cottage again and again for her wild logic and even wilder behaviour. Together they uncover and do away with the figures of terror from his past, notably the viscious father and cruel Ayah.
SM does not shrink from violence. The scene of skinning a sheep is absolutely not for the faint-hearted.
“What’s the opposite of consuming?” he asks her while she is in the middle of her butchery.
“Like, it’s another way of looking at a thing. You just look at it, whatever it is, creatively and you’ve made it. That way you’re working on yourself. You’re making gold.”
The prose style ranges from chatty to pure poetry. Wit and wisdom are the twin threads of this novel. It is a searingly honest journey into the psyche, with alchemy as the key to self-understanding. The pace never lets up. It’s surreal and yet somehow, you’re able to follow it.
The protagonist is Everyman. He is you and he is me. No, it is more than that: this is the narrative of a man talking to himself, but I, the reader, am that self. That’s how intimate it is.
Leon Battista Alberti once said – presumably quoting an even more ancient author – that it takes a good man to be a good painter. That is certainly true of writers and writing. John Moat is a good man, and this fictional autobiography is a very good book.
Linda Proud is the author of The Botecelli Trilogy set in Neoplatonic Florence. Her latest novel is A Gift for the Magus. She is Founder of Godstow Press
From the swamps of paranoia to the dizzy heights of self-realisation.
A review of A Fabrication of Gold by Lynn Batten, author of Tales from the 7.45
This book left me with some profound questions: What exactly did Ayah do? What did the police really want? Is there a recipe for the witch-therapist’s potions and has John Moat actually been sampling them?
If you like your fiction straight forward and your storyline blatant then this is not the book for you. If, however, you are up for being taken on a fascinating and very funny journey through the emotional and symbolic landscapes of the human heart and mind then read on. This book will take you from the swamps of paranoia to the dizzy heights of self realization and back again via everywhere.
This story is so beautifully written, with such good grace, that for me it transcends the subject matter and becomes an archetype, a fable. It is the story of a man, of a marriage, of a husband and father who finds himself forced to grapple with the intricacies and labyrinthine evolutions of what we narrowly term ‘a breakdown’ and of his struggle to embrace the life-changing nature of self discovery and subsequent transformative experiences.
Well…. that’s what I think it’s about! It made me laugh a lot and left me feeling lighter; but logic it is not. I think I understood completely, therefore I did. Or in the immortal words of Dr McCoy of Star Trek fame… “Its life Jim but not as we know it.”
The Alchemical Way
A review of A Fabrication of Gold by Jenny Hare
Gosh – this novel was totally not what I’d imagined it would be! I’d anticipated a gentle fiction woven around themes of spirituality and nature, infused of course with John Moat’s innate humour. Apart from the latter, for it is indeed very funny, this book, instead, is a non-stop flight along a man’s Jungian journey through mid-life crisis. Depressing and grey? Not a bit of it: this particular MLC is colourful and whacky. And the characters are mostly larger than life, vibrant and very real.
I felt I knew the off-beam therapist and the central family and I was intrigued by the various other eccentrics who people the story. The alchemical way interplays dream with reality and is allowed to follow its own often surreal stream of consciousness as the therapist introduces our hero to a quest for self-knowledge. She works holistically, eschewing the kind of cognitive behaviour therapy the government and NHS are currently championing. Instead she is repeatedly and rather refreshingly highly challenging and confrontational.
This interplay, when her hapless client unintentionally kills a bee, made me chuckle out loud: “Now look what you’ve done, you’ve killed a bee . . . Christ what’s the matter with you? . . . You upset him. Your energy must be terrible . . . You ought to do something about it.”
As I’m currently writing a book about creativity, I was drawn intuitively to read this book, feeling it would somehow relate to it. Although not in the way I expected, I was well rewarded, for a more creative novel you could hardly find. As a writer, painter and, in the day job, psychotherapist, the ‘gold’ for me, was this nugget from the therapist: “It’s another way of looking at a thing. You just look at it, whatever it is, creatively and you’ve made it. That way you’re working on yourself. You’re making gold.”
Yes!
