Fantastic Metropolis

He was a great humanist, and all the novels contain deep and meaningful conversations on the meaning of life, on how everything is interrelated. As Joe remarks in Nile Shadows,

all lives are secret tapestries that swirl and sweep through years with souls and strivings as the colors, the threads. And there may be little knots of tangled meaning everywhere beneath the surface, tying the colors and threads together, but the little knots aren’t important finally, only the sweep itself, the tapestry as a whole.

Whittemore continually returns to the universal themes of love and loss, the possibility of hope in desperate times, the meaninglessness of war, the vagaries of time, the way people, places, and objects resonate in our minds and feed our dreams.

Publishers Weekly described Edward Whittemore as “America’s best unknown novelist.” I hope that the reissue of his novels will finally bring him the acclaim that is rightfully his. He is far too good to be overlooked, and it is tragic that his genius and his wonderfully wise novels have been ignored for so long.

Postscript

As I wrote this essay, the war in Palestine had escalated and ancient sites in the Holy Land were being bombed. There appears to be no solution to the Palestinian question other than outright war. The Jerusalem Quartet, more than ever, is literature for our times. I leave you with this quote from Nile Shadows as a pithy message for the post-September 11 world.

...unfortunately barbarians do seem to serve a purpose in history, for when we have them as enemies at our gates we no longer have to judge ourselves. For a brief moment, anyway, our innate savagery is safely out there beyond the city walls and we can rejoice in our self-righteousness, and be smug in our petty civic virtues.

Anne Sydenham lives in Australia and maintains Jerusalem Dreaming, the best and most comprehensive Edward Whittemore resource site on the web.

This essay was first published in the New York Review of Science Fiction, Issue 173, Vol. 15 No. 5, January 2003.