Amaryllis Night and Day (2001)

Richly populated with images, this one kept me guessing all the way through: how much of this is real, how much dream. I loved the repetitions of themes and images and particularly enjoyed the idea that each human is given a box of music, sights and sounds when they are born which crop up again and again in the course of their lives. ( )

Hoban's first work since 'Angelica's Grotto', the London and the cast of 'Amaryllis Day and Night' are similar in many ways to that previous work. Though funny and metaphoric in equal parts, it is the poignancy of Amaryllis that hit me. Like a truck. The dream world, in which part of the story proceeds, is the virtual reality of painters and of literature. I'm sorry that it took me so long to find this book. ( )

The first time Peter Diggs saw Amaryllis she was at a bus stop where the street sign said "Balsamic" although there was vinegary about the place. The bus was unthinkably tall, made of yellow, orange and pink rice paper. That was a dream, but this romance soon begins to intersect with reality.

Having loved Riddley Walker, I finally got around to checking out something else by Hoban, and I'm so pleased I picked this one. The idea of the book is so awesome that I can't believe no-one's thought of it before – maybe they have – but it's about two people who find that they have the ability to enter each other's dreams. At first they explore the sexual possibilities of this enviable talent, and begin an unstable relationship half in real life and half in dream-worlds – but gradually nightmarish elements from their respective pasts begin to intrude into the dreams and force a kind of resolution.

It's a smallish book – I read it in a couple of days – and Hoban builds it up simply with short chapters and very clear writing. There is a pared-down feel to the dialogue which takes a little getting used to, but the effect is that he is somehow very easy to believe when he describes things which should be impossible. His evocation of the world of dreams is spot-on – logical yet illogical, sexy, frightening and difficult to pin down. Hoban is good at building up metaphors gradually as the novel goes on, and one of the most central to this book is the Klein bottle, a theoretical 4-dimensional object which has only one surface but which intersects with itself, like a kind of solid Möbius strip. Not easy to describe, but for Hoban it seems to represent the way our lives cross and re-cross the same physical and emotional points. This symbol and others like it resonate more and more as you go through the book, helped out by two very endearing and thoughtful central characters who, among other things, are concerned with the way art reflects and enriches life.

By the end, the idea of the dream itself begins to seem like a symbol of the way in which memories and past experiences can affect you in the present: how do we begin a new relationship when there is so much emotional baggage from previous mistakes and heartbreaks? That is, I suppose, what the book is trying to discuss in a new and sympathetic way. Appropriately enough, when I finished it, I felt like I'd woken up from a very beautiful and wise dream.

http://community.livejournal.com/hipsterbookclub/747186.html ( )

I really enjoyed this book. It should rank with Hobans best. ( )