Light Boxes

Thaddeus Lowe, lives with his wife, Selah, and their daughter, Bianca, in a small town that appears to be unnamed. For some reason an individual called February has decreed that it should remain winter for all time, so for the last three hundred days this demiurge has imposed a perpetual February upon this town and it’s environs, everything is dull, dark & grey, highlighted only by the frigid white of the snow as it drops from the leaden clouds that circle like crows overhead. On top of this he has also banned “Flight”, that means anything that can – Balloons, Flying machines, Kites, in fact he goes further anything, ANYTHING that has or possesses the ability to fly will be destroyed. His priests “for whenever such a being show more appears, instantaneously followers sprout from the soil they walk on”, haunt the town, stopping off at the school & library “They confiscated textbooks, tore out pages about birds, flying machines, Zeppelins, witches on brooms, balloons, kites, winged mythical creatures. They crumpled up paper airplanes the children had folded and they dumped the pages into a burning pit in the woods”. Any reference to flight is NOT allowed in February’s world as proclaimed by the Great man himself. Also Children are vanishing.

Thaddeus and his family, silently protest. Filling their home with images of flight hidden inside cupboards and on the undersides of crockery, even easily covered body parts are hennaed with complex kite patterns, their tails forming an intricate constellation as though an armour to ward off February’s onslaught. His wife makes concoctions of mint tea, salves, fill their bath with this herb, and make a soup.
Selah’s Mint Soup
8 cups chicken stock,
2 cups mint leaves
3 large eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
Hoping that this herb will protect them, and for a while it seems to work. At some point Thaddeus meets The Solution, a group of former balloonists who wear strange bird masks and who are planning to revolt against February, they have chosen Thaddeus to be their leader, to assist them in their war against the demiurge for the sake of his family, Thaddeus dreamt of “two miniature suns. I set one each upon their foreheads I dreamed a waterfall and a calm lake of my arms below to catch them” As The Solution then leave “walking, dreaming of flying in separate directions”. Shortly after agreeing to lead the rebellion, his daughter Bianca, disappears,
“Before daybreak, Thaddeus smells smoke and honey coming from Bianca’s bedroom. In her room he notices the window is open and snow is blowing in.
He throws the covers off the bed

He looks around the room.
He looks under the bed.
He looks in the closet.
He looks in the hallway.
He looks at his feet.
He looks at the bed. He looks at the bed.
Bianca's bed is a mound of snow and teeth.
Bianca is gone.

Apparently kidnapped from her bed. Now on a total war footing, Thaddeus & The Solution, try different tactics to defeat February, these range from pretending spring has arrived & ignoring the freezing conditions, hoisting poles to destroy the clouds & creating this elaborate system to carry boiling water to melt the snow – all fail in the end & anger February.

This is a book that is strange, beautiful, quirky, that is absurd, eccentric, that I could plough through a multitude of thesauri and still only offer you morsels, an amuse-bouche from a fine dining experience. Light Boxes is a book of poems, chants, and notes, of mantras & magic, of lists, of love & hate. This is also a book that will divide, some will love its use of different fonts, font-sizes, lists & formats, the fact that some pages contain merely a sentence & others a catalogue of names, others these same devices will annoy. For me this was wonderful, the look, the feel of the book, everything from the artwork to the poetry inside, enchanted and beguiled me. Lee Rourke in his fantastic book “A Brief History of Fables” described it as a contemporary fable & as such it has the ability to “ Shed light on whatever it is we look at, because it speaks to us in the same way that all good fables do, no matter how far-fetched or magical and hallucinatory they at first may seem: in a language we can truly understand” .
I’ll leave the last word on this beautiful and heart-rending poetic fable, myth, novel (?) to February.

“I wanted to write you a story about magic. I wanted rabbits appearing from hats. I wanted balloons lifting you into the sky. It turned out to be nothing but sadness, war, heartbreak. You never saw it, but there’s a garden inside me.”

http://parrishlantern.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/light-boxesshane-jones.html show less

A small town has been experiencing February with all it's snow and darkness, for two years. The townspeople are fed up enough to fight back, which makes February even more angry, and he begins stealing the town's children. When Thaddeus' young daughter is taken, he and his wife come apart, and all the schemes to stop February fail. Through his grief, Thaddeus makes a plan to confront and end February at any cost.

Highly surreal, this story sometimes has to be pieces together. Normally that would annoy me, but not here, as I was so taken with the original style and strange story.

From the epigraph:
The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February. -- Joseph Wood Krutch

Light Boxes opens as hot-air balloonist Thaddeus Lowe, his wife Selah and young daughter Bianca, and their whole close-knit town are enjoying the last evenings of pleasant weather before February arrives. But then February does descend, and worse than ever -- ordering the destruction of all forms and creatures of flight and refusing to vacate and make way for spring -- eventually prompting the town to organize an underground resistance.

I loved it in the beginning -- intriguing, with poetic imagery and emotion, for example from Thaddeus:

“I closed my eyes. I imagined Selah and Bianca in a canoe so show more narrow they had to lie down with their arms folded on their stomachs, their heads at opposite ends, their toes touching. I dreamed two miniature suns. I set one each upon their foreheads. I dreamed a waterfall and a calm lake of my arms below to catch them.”

I also like its experimental structure (multiple narrators; odd fonts and formatting; chapters comprised of single sentences, partial pages, and lists), which is sometimes used to marvelous effect (and sometimes grows tiresome). I liked the story less as hundreds of days of February pass and things turn from mysterious to dystopian and war-ish -- but that’s what really happens in February, yes? And that's what fans of dystopian fiction may like the most.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.) show less

It's called a novel, I suppose because it has to be classified as something for the sake of marketing, but it really defies genre. It is poetry, flash fiction, a fable, a fairy tale for grown-ups, like Grimm's tales before they were sanitized for children. The language is gorgeous, the images are vivid and clearly wrought, the story is engrossing. I must admit, I'm not entirely sure what the message is: something to do with freedom, but also I couldn't help but read a critique on both capitalism (as societal control) and religion (particularly Christianity) in it; I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, but it is lovely, exquisite and worth a closer reading in the future.

Why I read it: Randomly plucked from the library. It was short. It concerned hot air balloons, something that have always struck me as buoyant whimsical things well suited to fantasy/fairy tales.

Pros: Inventive, original, weird. Prose sometimes more poetry-like than normal exposition. Didn't know it was going to be so allegorical, but liked how that grew into it a lot.

Cons: More odd than anything else (“anything else” being things like “fun, sad, happy, engaging”). More weird than fairy tale-like. Unconventional structure interesting but didn't particularly add anything for me. Hot air balloons not as involved as I thought. Low on whimsy.

Conclusion: One of those reads where my enjoyment comes mostly from marveling at the show more author's imagination than enjoying the work for what it is exactly. It'd make a really unnerving and very cool looking movie, probably directed by Terry Gilliam. Wouldn't want to spend long on something like this, but considering how short it was, it was nice for a change of pace. I wish I could read things with worlds and images this unique and inventive that also had the kinds of characters/prose style that engage me. show less

Light Boxes features my favorite cover of the year so far, but unfortunately that was the high point of reading it.

It's a fable about . . . well, there's a never-ending February (caused, apparently, by an entity named February) that raises issues of oppression, depression and sunlight deprivation, but eventually seems to be about a writer struggling with obstacles to expressing his creativity. Thaddeus, a balloonist, and his wife and daughter ("the girl of honey and smoke") are at the center of the story; the gentlemen on the book cover are a resistance group calling themselves The Solution who wear bird masks. Children have gone missing. The goal is to defeat February and restore June and July (I know, what about March, April and show more May?), and bring the children back. The title light boxes fit over the head and seem analogous to the SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) lamps you can get.

“They held me and told me everything would be fine, that sadness would rise from our bones and evaporate in sunlight the way morning fog burned off the river in summer. My mother rubbed the kites {tattooed} on my hands and arms and told me to think of my lungs as balloons.

I just want to feel safe, I said.”

The story is surreal, and not awful, but for me it was too light and self-consciously enigmatic. Some will probably enjoy its oddness. Reportedly Spike Jonze bought the movie rights. It's unfortunate that this book can't be judged by its inviting cover. show less

I think I formed far too concrete of an expectation for this, based on... nothing? The cover, our weather? The book was good in its own right but I also want to read the story I half-imagined. Basically what I am saying is it doesn't matter how surrealistically you meta, I want an epic defeat of February.