Secession

A New Novel

A.R. Lamb

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Written in an alert, spare prose of astonishing lucidity and compression, Secession begins hilariously with a nervous young burglar standing in a drizzling garden, trying to summon the courage to bring his intended crime to a conclusion. Terp is the abject yet appealing issue of a broken marriage. He seeks to patch up the cracks in his life but discovers everyone is in a similar state of disrepair. Theft secures him a motorbike and enables him to explore Dartmoor where he meets a young woman, Demelza, to whom he is attracted, and her friend, Jack, who share with him their attitudes and beliefs. Jack introduces him to the magic mushrooms that grow on the moor. It transpires he wishes to establish a cult around these flawlessly self-centred fungi as an alternative to the spiritually polluted contemporary scene. Terp proves an eager recruit and is primed in the basic skills. But now it is the task of these psychedelic Calvinists to evolve a structure, a workable blueprint, so that they might flow seamlessly into vegetative soul of the mushroom – a fungi who, long before the dawn of civilization, charmed the sabre-toothed tiger into a state of beatific extinction.

The group is joined by the commanding figure of the crashed airman, Barg, who like Icarus falls from sky to ocean. After being imprisoned and decontaminated by the group, Barg succumbs to their creed, sacrificing his starchy upbringing for this brave new world in the making. The female current is amplified by Carla and Moira, two succouring priestesses of the evolving order. The sect decide they will communicate in Cornish, a Sleeping Beauty tongue, undefiled by the casuistry of consumerism, and sorely in need of the kiss of their integrity to restore its functionality. Elaborate rules and regulations are despised. Their unique mindset demands a trappist containment so that it may filter out the false from the dynamic concentrates of the authentic. Thus an amazing social experiment is launched. Spectacular strides are taken, visions and manifestations conjured and translated, affections and empathies planted and nourished, but inevitably discord and the phallic imperative make their appearance, too. Minds boil over into scalding breakdown as boundaries stretch into the literally ‘boundless’. The apple, once tasted, starts to reveal a bitter aftertaste, but surely there is benevolent fanaticism enough to conquer these setbacks? Does the conclave posses the obdurate cohesion necessary to incarnate a pristine world within the shoddy shell of humanity’s predicament? Or will they have to bide their time and await the natural fruition of what they have initiated? Suffused with astonishing insights, maintaining an ironic poise and dexterity of plotting that ensnares the reader from first page to last, Secession offers a unique social critique as well as an ineradicable vision of the light and dark sides of paradise.

Buy your copy now at Amazon UK

A.R. Lamb's remarkable first novel Divers is available at Electron Press

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