the arimasen dialogues: A Philosophical Novel

Some books you read. A few read you back.

The Arimasen Dialogues belongs firmly to that second, stranger category.

Welcome to Arimasen. The word is Japanese for there is not, and the place is quite like Earth in most respects, save for one: it lies beyond Space, Time, and Matter. Coherence has quietly decamped. The philosophers approve, the politicians do not. Whether Arimasen is a planet, a metaphor, a hallucination, or a long shared dream is a question the novel keeps asking and never quite answers. Maybe it's a rock opera.

In the oasis of Kadesh Barnea, an election is underway. One candidate, Murray Katzenbogen a.k.a. Murray Katz a.k.a. Muri Statesman a.k.a. Your Majesty, is running for king. A rock band called the Statesmen, long extinct, featured Muri as lead singer; his twin brother Rick a.k.a. Asaph the Psalmist wrote the songs, the psalms, and is now composing, or rumoured to be composing, the Opera that will climax the Kadesh Barnea Rock Festival. The Opera, it is rumoured, will give His Majesty his lost voice back. A talk show narrator who may or may not be Neil Grass narrates events he may or may not be inside of.

Philosopher of philosophers is one Reuben Ash, whose disciples treat his silences as scripture and his words as commentary thereon. "I use words to transcend words," his last word before falling silent altogether, amid speculation whether the silence is triumphant, resigned, or despairing.

The tone shifts from farce to lament to metaphysics inside a single page, and somehow the seams hold. The humour is sharp without being mean. The melancholy is real without being heavy.