Marc Nash, Three Dreams in the Key of G, Dead Ink, 2019
extract
In peace-agreement Ulster a mother rears her two daughters, as her husband is decommissioned from his violent paramilitary past.
In Florida a septuagenarian runs a community refuge for women and the authorities have surrounded it as a threat to national security. In laboratories all over the world the human genome is being dissected and decoded.
In Three Dreams in the Key of G three female voices, Mother, Crone and Creatrix, unknowingly influence each other's fates as each battles to assert themselves and discover their voices in hostile environments.
In post Peace Agreement Northern Ireland, a young mother feels besieged. Both by the demands of motherhood and her militant Loyalist husband, decommissioned with the advent of Peace and thrown back into the world of the domestic hearth; whither the violence of his soul? To stop her mind becoming silted up through inactivity, surrounded by the infantile and the exasperating, she maintains a journal. Through which she pursues questions of nature versus nurture in the development of her children, within a divided society such as Northern Ireland, proffering its rarefied environment of acquired symbol and historical legacy. Only, why is her journal all out of sequence and what meaning can it therefore provide to answer her despairing question, 'why do we even have children?'
In Florida, a British septuagenarian with no papers and no official existence, also finds herself under a state of siege. Her community is currently surrounded by FBI, ATF and DEA armed agents. Yet they are not a sect of any kind, rather a refuge for battered women. And while it is true she does have a scheme for redrawing the map of the world, it could hardly be said to be a doomsday scenario. Except maybe, if you're a male of the species. Her fight is for hearts and minds, which might explain why her principal manifestation appears to be through the internet. Where lurk useful allies for her in the war of information technology.
In commercial laboratories all over the world, the human genome is being decoded and compiled. Or ravished and dissected depending on your point of view. What is that textual voice feedbacking through the monitors? Protesting the assault; challenging the epistemologies of both scientist and theologian; chiding us for our linear notions of relationship, the depleted metaphors with which we construct thought and even our 26 letter alphabet in the face of the genome's intricate weaves formed from combinations of just 4 letters. Goading us that we will never unravel the mystery that lies behind the genetic code, unless we open up our very natures to unlimited potential.
Three powerful female characters, Mother, Crone and genetic Creatrix. None of them will meekly submit to their besiegers. Their three narrative voices, intercut and interweave with one another. In a sense, all three are palimpsests, constantly writing over, and being written by, one of the other two. Whether they are aware or not, they are being informed by another intimate voice so close at hand, as to be under the skin. Will the language they are able to draw on, be sufficiently robust to meet their enquiries, or will it betray them and lead the triumph of their besiegers?
https://www.thedreamcage.com/2018/07/book-three-dreams-in-key-of-g_26.html
Hold tight. Because I’m now going to try to explain what I think is happening in Three Dreams in the Key of G. As the title hints, there are three narrative strands, although they are not particularly dreamy. The first contains the journal entries of Jean Ome, a mother of two children living in Ulster and married to a man who has connections to violent Protestant paramilitaries. These journal entries have been written infrequently and with no definite purpose by an intelligent and frustrated woman trapped by circumstances who is prone to prolixity. Just to make things extra difficult, they have all been muddled up and are presented out of order.
The second strand is made up of internet messages from Jean Ohm, an equally verbose voice, but one under severe constraint. Ohm supposedly lives in a kind of sanctuary for battered women and claims to have found a way to breed without men – and that she is writing her missives while under siege from the “FBI, DEA, ATF and all manner of sect-obsessed acronyms”.
The third strand is a hectoring Greek chorus, presented by – bear with me – a genome. That’s to say, A, C, T and G: the four letters in the sequence of DNA. This voice is also called the “Creatrix” and its general role is to explain the mysteries of genetics and the hubris of mankind for thinking it can map out such complexities, even though, as the voice reminds us: “You, you don’t even know you’ve been born. How or why.”
I’m not wholly confident about all this, but I’m confident no summary can really do justice to this fearsomely complicated book. Nothing is certain and everything is presented in dense, complex and frequently confusing sentences.
There’s something exhilarating about a novel that cares so little for reading pleasure. Marc Nash hasn’t compromised his vision in any way, which is admirable. But there are also obvious problems. Three Dreams in the Key of G can be a brutal slog, with Nash laying down some punishment prose. Such as: “For even though I range with my counter of lachrymosity and flash my bloodshot lens, I’m fumbling to illuminate America’s topmost popular pastime, spouse beating.”
Riddle me this too: “Like the freestanding bridge designed by one of the sharpest minds to fall furthest from your topiary of knowledge.” Or: “It’s not down to the climatic marasmus, however.” The undernourished climate? And there’s this: “The glorious, faceless, nameless failures, borne on powerfully broad shoulders upon which you gnomically squat.” Why all the adjectives? How does one squat “gnomically”?
Such gnarly prose can get annoying. So too can the Nash’s propensity for making puns (“Jean’s gene genie is out of the box.”). No thanks.
Yet while such writing is ugly, it isn’t purposeless. Early on, Nash has his genome narrator explain: “Here we are forensically investigating the intent, the every nuance of verbiage itself.” Nash is always making suggestions about the limitations of language and the combinations we can achieve with the 26 letters in our alphabet. (All those letters, the Creatrix reminds us, can do less than just A, C, T and G.) Eventually, I had to concede that there was validity to the way the voices of his three different narrators become virtually indistinguishable: they might have all swallowed the same dictionary.
These voices can also be beautiful, exhilarating and funny. The DNA strand can be especially amusing, lording it over computers for only working in binary: “They can also count the number of letter E’s in the works of Shakespeare, but that doesn’t mean they can approach him any the better either.” Miaow!
When I reached that passage, I realised I was actually starting to appreciate this unusual book. Yes, I found it frustrating and occasionally dull, but this book becomes increasingly intriguing and challenging as it goes. The questions it poses about free will and self-determination have been asked before, and the themes of male violence and irresponsibility are all too familiar. But Nash’s approach to them is original. It’s daring. (As, incidentally, is his attempt to give sympathetic voice to female experience, at a time when so much ink is wasted on debating who is allowed to write what.)
Nash never makes things easy for his readers, but he does give us an emotional core to cling to. Particularly Jean Ome, who is never sentimental and is as likely to recall the “green-brown inky squirt” in a nappy as she is her baby’s smile – but that makes the bond between mother and child seem all the stronger. Many of the intimate scenes of home life have real power. Similarly, the questions the book asks feel ever more urgent. I had to respect this book, in spite of everything. It is curiously impressive. - Sam Jordison
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/26/not-the-booker-three-dreams-in-the-key-of-g-by-marc-nash-review-curiously-impressive
Three Dreams in the Key of G, by Marc Nash, is a book that took me some time to engage with. The language used is complex in places with much play on words not often employed in storytelling. There is a reason for this which when revealed left me exhilarated. The ideas presented and their presentation will not easily be eclipsed.
The story utilises three voices. The most accessible is that of a young mother living in small town, small minded, mid Ulster as the peace process is brokered. She is married to a staunch Loyalist, despising his hate filled rhetoric but silently. Where once she had dreams of attending university in Belfast, her family vetoed this plan due to the possible dangers a young girl could be faced with living alone in a big city. These dangers concerned the freedom from family watchfulness, freedom from the ever present threat of their opprobrium, and what such freedom might enable her to become.
The second voice is that of the human genome project – somehow the author makes this work. It explores how humans seek to understand and thereby control what they are, their essential make up. Man wishes to meddle to prolong life, to affect what he creates. There is still much that he does not comprehend about what makes him what he is. This voice is resonant with irony and wit. The details bring man down to size, mocking his earnest endeavours. However marvellous scientific discoveries may be their impact will be shadowed by other influences.
The third voice is that of an elderly lady running a refuge for victims of domestic violence in America. The state is suspicious of her attempts to escape the deleterious effects of overt masculinity. They regard her venture as a threat.
The mother writes in her journal of her thoughts and experiences with her two young daughters. Having accepted this path for her life, as is expected of the women in her family and community, she rails against its constrictions. She aims to raise her children well, with little help from her husband: “the troubles (small ‘t’)“. She ponders what her girls have inherited from their parents and how this will affect them as they develop, what language they will learn to speak.
“Cooing and trilling, sound cantered asunder like spiderlings ballooning on their silk threads. But gradually she anchors her vocal drift, as she ingests the intoned gobbets spilling from my tongue. I watch her kneading the sounds, hands to mouth, a second, invisible umbilical from me to her. Passing along my dead language. That parched parchment from my cracked and parched lips that will not quench her thirst for congruence. For I recognise it will only succeed in re-sealing the esophagal aperture magically parted by her genes.”
“A dead language emanating from someone who scarcely lives a life. But even this is not the mummifying cause. The language, my language, is sententious and doctrinaire. Replete with exclamations, directives and interrogatives.”
“So the everyday arpeggio of parenting inevitably thrums and frets my stretched nerve strings. Single noted, sharp and shrill, instead of flat and even. A drone all the same. Off-kilter rather than merely off key. Whatever the issue at hand, the tilting ground, the mittened gauntlet thrown down is ratcheted up into a disproportionate response on my part. Since, no matter how much it is cloaked with the pathognomy of tiredness or frustration, behind each and every one of my emissions flares the filament of anger. The incendiary of rage and dejection at myself and what I have become.”
As the mother goes through her days – shopping, school runs, desolate beach trips, daytime TV – the genome project churns out its findings, musing on why it is being attempted.
“For there is only Sex and Death. Passing on and passing over and vice versa. How your trepidation over mortality feeds into your procreative drive. The pair intertwined round one another like poison ivy.”
“I deal in the architecture of potentia, where you are grounded in the material shoring of tenure. See, the key difference between you and I is that life and time stretch everlasting into the future, for me as DNA and you as my prized host bloodstock. But not for you as individuals.”
In the refuge women are also procreating, but not with those who drove them to reside in this place. Their choices, their autonomy to make such choices, are what the state sees as a threat. Women should exist for man’s pleasure and the perpetuation of his genes.
This is remarkable writing that explores man’s proclivities and purported cleverness. Each relationship is shown to be one sided, supposed understanding a reflection of self. Man can draw the map and tinker around the edges of the detail, but how much of true note can be changed?
All of this is explored, dissected, and presented in language rich with depth and meaning. The conclusions are salient yet, when considered dispassionately, unsurprising. Man chooses to ignore so much in plain sight as he strokes his prejudices and vanities.
A book that soars and leaves a frisson in its contrails. A challenging, stunning, wholly satisfying creation. -
https://neverimitate.wordpress.com/2018/07/24/book-review-three-dreams-in-the-key-of-g/
Hidden amongst the words and paragraphs of Three Dreams In the Key Of G is a secret code that is begging to be deciphered. It’s there, the ultimate thesis Marc Nash wants us to take away from his story, I can see it. But, every time I thought I had a good grasp on it, Nash moved us to a different perspective and I had to start all over again. Three Dreams is a very interesting book, one that I’ll be pondering for a long time, but ultimately left me hanging.
I wish I could give you the exact plot of the book. I know it has to do with three characters: a mother, an older woman whom might be the head of a cult, and DNA. The book weaves between the three of them, the Mother telling us her story through her diary, the old woman, Jean, writing in her blog, and DNA speaking to us with its different genome sequences.
Their stories are told through a rambling stream of conscious. Thoughts jump from one thing to the next, sometimes going off on a tangent before settling on a point they were trying to make pages before. Some of the passages are beautiful, highlighting Nash’s mastery of the English language. It’s just too bad they are hidden amongst a slog of sentences that bog down the beauty.
I’m not the biggest fan of stories written in this style. I can appreciate the work. Nash’s ability to find three unique and fully realised voices is top notch. I just have a hard time following the train of thought, sometimes getting lost on one path before realising the narrator has moved on to something else.
At times I found it easier to let the words flow and see if I could discern what was important. Maybe that’s the reason why Nash wrote it in this style, forcing the reader to determine what they want to get out of the story. I’m all for a story making me work, but at times it didn’t feel like the effort was worth it.
It’s not all incoherent. The Mother’s section is the most grounded of the three. Through the intimacy of her journal we are instantly connected to her and her thoughts on motherhood. She lays it all out, the mundane, the wonderful, and the heartbreaking. She lays herself bare holding nothing back. The questions she pose are probably the same ones every parent has asked. Did she say the right thing? Who should she invite to a birthday party? What will the children think of her when they are older?
The other two characters have the more wild and unpredictable stories. At times they were fun, at other times they were more confusing.
Jean works at a women’s clinic and believes that men are the cause of all the problems of the world. She has an idea of removing the Y chromosome from DNA to eventually fill the world with just females. Cool, I get that. It’s a neat concept that I think would be awesome to explore. But, she is so focused on being smart and cute on her blog that it just comes across as someone that wants attention. She alludes to the clinic being under siege by the FBI, but we never truly get to see it. Which leads me to wondering if it was true or it was just something she made up for her blog.
Then we have DNA defending its right to protect its secrets. Which gives us a sort of trial situation, with DNA on the stand defending itself through bizarre typography and layout styles. Nash uses a lot of unique word choices, digging deep into the dictionary and thesaurus to give DNA a smarmy attitude. It feels a bit like a Word-of-the-day calendar, which can be fun but can also pull you out of the story.
When I was done with Three Dreams In The Key Of G I was exhausted. My brain felt like it had been through an intense workout. Nash is at the top of his game with this amazing feat of fiction. I don’t know if it’ll be for everyone, stream of conscious stories are definitely an acquired taste. But, the ideas presented in here make it worth the effort and time you’ll put into reading it. - Matt Brandenburg
storgy.com/2018/09/04/book-review-three-dreams-in-the-key-of-g-by-marc-nash/
Dead Ink is a Liverpool based publisher (part of the Northern Fiction Alliance) and their previous output includes the acclaimed anthology Know Your Place, Gary Budden’s debut collection Hollow Shores, as well as Harry Gallon’s first two novels (click here to see my review of his debut, The Shapes of Dogs Eyes, for Open Pen) and the absolutely astounding Sealed by Naomi Booth, which has been my go-to fiction recommendation since I read it.
DIGRESSION: Sealed is a post apocalyptic novel about a disease which causes a sufferer’s skin to seal over their bodily orifices – think Cormac McCarthy’s The Road but with more dread and less violence; think The Rover, think Children of Men, think of a *perfect* popular novel – both plot-driven and characterful, its omission from the Man Booker list a travesty. However, the fact that it made this year’s shortlist of the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize (last year won by Winnie M Lee’s Dark Chapter) is some consolation for Dead Ink. That accolade, however, is both diminished and expanded by the presence of a SECOND Dead Ink book on the same award shortlist: this one. Yes, that’s right: fan of TriumphoftheNow.com Marc Nash has been shortlisted for the Not the Booker Prize for his complex, experimental, novel, Three Dreams In The Key of G.
Nash’s latest is a multi-part text that includes three narrators, one of whom is a young mother in a loyalist household in Ulster at the turn of the millennium. The second narrator is an old woman facing off, online, against the amassed forces of the United States’ various law enforcement agencies. She is typing within a Floridian refuge for victims of male abuse (both women and gay men) where they are attempting to edit the human genome to forever destroy the male gender. The third strand – and the one that, for me, kept me from falling in “book love” with Three Dreams in the Key of G – is a discursive and digressive monologue that supposedly comes from the psyche of the human genome itself. As the book went on and these sections reappeared, I kept hoping for a connection to the other threads that was as thematically and emotionally powerful as the links between the young and the old women. And I didn’t find it.
All three sections of the novel are written with a wider vocabulary than my own, and this is something that generally turns me off a novel. I have two English degrees (#catchphrase) and read (on average) two books a week, so when a word I don’t know occurs in a novel that isn’t technical jargon (which is allowed) or its meaning isn’t obvious from the context, I’m secure in stating that it’s the writer either intentionally showing off or accidentally forgetting his readers. And, yes, it is usually his: women who know big words don’t tend to have the insecurities that plague excessively polysyllabic men. But, with Nash’s novel, I got over my linguistic disapproval: even though these characters speak with language that (a few too many times) prevents understanding on a sentence level (I’m not using a dictionary when reading English-language fiction, I’m almost 30 years old), Nash successfully evokes two complex characters, both of whom are in vastly different locations and linked, purely, by a shared history of poor relationships. Both are mothers, both identify as British2 (even though one was born on Ireland), and both speak with a similarly intellectual, though unrehearsed, voice.
The themes of these two narrators connect: the violence and incompetence of men, the unfairness of conservative ideals of motherhood, the value of private thought and learning… They gel together, as separate narratives, in a coherent and interesting way, drawing attention to different parts of the other. The third part, however, often felt to me like little more than intellectual filler, and maybe it was the language and the sentence structure and the deliberate and never-unmasked lack of humanity to the voice, but I failed to slip into a satisfying engagement with the voice, with its opinions and interpretations. And I think this was the problem: the voice spoke opinions and interpretations rather than feelings and emotions, and I can’t go for that (no can do).
I was expecting, or hoping, that the three threads would neatly tie together by the novel’s end, each revealed to be the same woman at different stages of her life, perhaps, or – preferably – something more unexpected than that. Although the disconnect between the sections in Ulster and Florida always remains (geographically), the two narratives humanely and engagingly explore similar ideas. The talking genome thread, though, with a bolshy, lecturer, tone of condescension, never clicked with me – right until the end I was hoping for a reveal that would emotionally justify its inclusion, but for me this didn’t happen. It was disappointing for me, because I felt that two thirds of this novel were great, and able to incorporate an exploration of humanity into the kind of clever-person-writing that usually makes me roll my eyes and write another poo poem.
I thoroughly enjoyed two thirds of Three Dream in the Key of G, and maybe a more intelligent reader (or a reader less interested in emotionality) might get more out of the genome sections than I did. However, for me this was a novel that spent a full third of itself doing all the things I don’t like a novel to do.
Still, the two thirds I liked were good. -
https://triumphofthenow.com/2018/09/01/three-dreams-in-the-key-of-g-by-marc-nash/
extract
In peace-agreement Ulster a mother rears her two daughters, as her husband is decommissioned from his violent paramilitary past.
In Florida a septuagenarian runs a community refuge for women and the authorities have surrounded it as a threat to national security. In laboratories all over the world the human genome is being dissected and decoded.
In Three Dreams in the Key of G three female voices, Mother, Crone and Creatrix, unknowingly influence each other's fates as each battles to assert themselves and discover their voices in hostile environments.
In post Peace Agreement Northern Ireland, a young mother feels besieged. Both by the demands of motherhood and her militant Loyalist husband, decommissioned with the advent of Peace and thrown back into the world of the domestic hearth; whither the violence of his soul? To stop her mind becoming silted up through inactivity, surrounded by the infantile and the exasperating, she maintains a journal. Through which she pursues questions of nature versus nurture in the development of her children, within a divided society such as Northern Ireland, proffering its rarefied environment of acquired symbol and historical legacy. Only, why is her journal all out of sequence and what meaning can it therefore provide to answer her despairing question, 'why do we even have children?'
In Florida, a British septuagenarian with no papers and no official existence, also finds herself under a state of siege. Her community is currently surrounded by FBI, ATF and DEA armed agents. Yet they are not a sect of any kind, rather a refuge for battered women. And while it is true she does have a scheme for redrawing the map of the world, it could hardly be said to be a doomsday scenario. Except maybe, if you're a male of the species. Her fight is for hearts and minds, which might explain why her principal manifestation appears to be through the internet. Where lurk useful allies for her in the war of information technology.
In commercial laboratories all over the world, the human genome is being decoded and compiled. Or ravished and dissected depending on your point of view. What is that textual voice feedbacking through the monitors? Protesting the assault; challenging the epistemologies of both scientist and theologian; chiding us for our linear notions of relationship, the depleted metaphors with which we construct thought and even our 26 letter alphabet in the face of the genome's intricate weaves formed from combinations of just 4 letters. Goading us that we will never unravel the mystery that lies behind the genetic code, unless we open up our very natures to unlimited potential.
Three powerful female characters, Mother, Crone and genetic Creatrix. None of them will meekly submit to their besiegers. Their three narrative voices, intercut and interweave with one another. In a sense, all three are palimpsests, constantly writing over, and being written by, one of the other two. Whether they are aware or not, they are being informed by another intimate voice so close at hand, as to be under the skin. Will the language they are able to draw on, be sufficiently robust to meet their enquiries, or will it betray them and lead the triumph of their besiegers?
https://www.thedreamcage.com/2018/07/book-three-dreams-in-key-of-g_26.html
Hold tight. Because I’m now going to try to explain what I think is happening in Three Dreams in the Key of G. As the title hints, there are three narrative strands, although they are not particularly dreamy. The first contains the journal entries of Jean Ome, a mother of two children living in Ulster and married to a man who has connections to violent Protestant paramilitaries. These journal entries have been written infrequently and with no definite purpose by an intelligent and frustrated woman trapped by circumstances who is prone to prolixity. Just to make things extra difficult, they have all been muddled up and are presented out of order.
The second strand is made up of internet messages from Jean Ohm, an equally verbose voice, but one under severe constraint. Ohm supposedly lives in a kind of sanctuary for battered women and claims to have found a way to breed without men – and that she is writing her missives while under siege from the “FBI, DEA, ATF and all manner of sect-obsessed acronyms”.
The third strand is a hectoring Greek chorus, presented by – bear with me – a genome. That’s to say, A, C, T and G: the four letters in the sequence of DNA. This voice is also called the “Creatrix” and its general role is to explain the mysteries of genetics and the hubris of mankind for thinking it can map out such complexities, even though, as the voice reminds us: “You, you don’t even know you’ve been born. How or why.”
I’m not wholly confident about all this, but I’m confident no summary can really do justice to this fearsomely complicated book. Nothing is certain and everything is presented in dense, complex and frequently confusing sentences.
There’s something exhilarating about a novel that cares so little for reading pleasure. Marc Nash hasn’t compromised his vision in any way, which is admirable. But there are also obvious problems. Three Dreams in the Key of G can be a brutal slog, with Nash laying down some punishment prose. Such as: “For even though I range with my counter of lachrymosity and flash my bloodshot lens, I’m fumbling to illuminate America’s topmost popular pastime, spouse beating.”
Riddle me this too: “Like the freestanding bridge designed by one of the sharpest minds to fall furthest from your topiary of knowledge.” Or: “It’s not down to the climatic marasmus, however.” The undernourished climate? And there’s this: “The glorious, faceless, nameless failures, borne on powerfully broad shoulders upon which you gnomically squat.” Why all the adjectives? How does one squat “gnomically”?
Such gnarly prose can get annoying. So too can the Nash’s propensity for making puns (“Jean’s gene genie is out of the box.”). No thanks.
Yet while such writing is ugly, it isn’t purposeless. Early on, Nash has his genome narrator explain: “Here we are forensically investigating the intent, the every nuance of verbiage itself.” Nash is always making suggestions about the limitations of language and the combinations we can achieve with the 26 letters in our alphabet. (All those letters, the Creatrix reminds us, can do less than just A, C, T and G.) Eventually, I had to concede that there was validity to the way the voices of his three different narrators become virtually indistinguishable: they might have all swallowed the same dictionary.
These voices can also be beautiful, exhilarating and funny. The DNA strand can be especially amusing, lording it over computers for only working in binary: “They can also count the number of letter E’s in the works of Shakespeare, but that doesn’t mean they can approach him any the better either.” Miaow!
When I reached that passage, I realised I was actually starting to appreciate this unusual book. Yes, I found it frustrating and occasionally dull, but this book becomes increasingly intriguing and challenging as it goes. The questions it poses about free will and self-determination have been asked before, and the themes of male violence and irresponsibility are all too familiar. But Nash’s approach to them is original. It’s daring. (As, incidentally, is his attempt to give sympathetic voice to female experience, at a time when so much ink is wasted on debating who is allowed to write what.)
Nash never makes things easy for his readers, but he does give us an emotional core to cling to. Particularly Jean Ome, who is never sentimental and is as likely to recall the “green-brown inky squirt” in a nappy as she is her baby’s smile – but that makes the bond between mother and child seem all the stronger. Many of the intimate scenes of home life have real power. Similarly, the questions the book asks feel ever more urgent. I had to respect this book, in spite of everything. It is curiously impressive. - Sam Jordison
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/26/not-the-booker-three-dreams-in-the-key-of-g-by-marc-nash-review-curiously-impressive
Three Dreams in the Key of G, by Marc Nash, is a book that took me some time to engage with. The language used is complex in places with much play on words not often employed in storytelling. There is a reason for this which when revealed left me exhilarated. The ideas presented and their presentation will not easily be eclipsed.
The story utilises three voices. The most accessible is that of a young mother living in small town, small minded, mid Ulster as the peace process is brokered. She is married to a staunch Loyalist, despising his hate filled rhetoric but silently. Where once she had dreams of attending university in Belfast, her family vetoed this plan due to the possible dangers a young girl could be faced with living alone in a big city. These dangers concerned the freedom from family watchfulness, freedom from the ever present threat of their opprobrium, and what such freedom might enable her to become.
The second voice is that of the human genome project – somehow the author makes this work. It explores how humans seek to understand and thereby control what they are, their essential make up. Man wishes to meddle to prolong life, to affect what he creates. There is still much that he does not comprehend about what makes him what he is. This voice is resonant with irony and wit. The details bring man down to size, mocking his earnest endeavours. However marvellous scientific discoveries may be their impact will be shadowed by other influences.
The third voice is that of an elderly lady running a refuge for victims of domestic violence in America. The state is suspicious of her attempts to escape the deleterious effects of overt masculinity. They regard her venture as a threat.
The mother writes in her journal of her thoughts and experiences with her two young daughters. Having accepted this path for her life, as is expected of the women in her family and community, she rails against its constrictions. She aims to raise her children well, with little help from her husband: “the troubles (small ‘t’)“. She ponders what her girls have inherited from their parents and how this will affect them as they develop, what language they will learn to speak.
“Cooing and trilling, sound cantered asunder like spiderlings ballooning on their silk threads. But gradually she anchors her vocal drift, as she ingests the intoned gobbets spilling from my tongue. I watch her kneading the sounds, hands to mouth, a second, invisible umbilical from me to her. Passing along my dead language. That parched parchment from my cracked and parched lips that will not quench her thirst for congruence. For I recognise it will only succeed in re-sealing the esophagal aperture magically parted by her genes.”
“A dead language emanating from someone who scarcely lives a life. But even this is not the mummifying cause. The language, my language, is sententious and doctrinaire. Replete with exclamations, directives and interrogatives.”
“So the everyday arpeggio of parenting inevitably thrums and frets my stretched nerve strings. Single noted, sharp and shrill, instead of flat and even. A drone all the same. Off-kilter rather than merely off key. Whatever the issue at hand, the tilting ground, the mittened gauntlet thrown down is ratcheted up into a disproportionate response on my part. Since, no matter how much it is cloaked with the pathognomy of tiredness or frustration, behind each and every one of my emissions flares the filament of anger. The incendiary of rage and dejection at myself and what I have become.”
As the mother goes through her days – shopping, school runs, desolate beach trips, daytime TV – the genome project churns out its findings, musing on why it is being attempted.
“For there is only Sex and Death. Passing on and passing over and vice versa. How your trepidation over mortality feeds into your procreative drive. The pair intertwined round one another like poison ivy.”
“I deal in the architecture of potentia, where you are grounded in the material shoring of tenure. See, the key difference between you and I is that life and time stretch everlasting into the future, for me as DNA and you as my prized host bloodstock. But not for you as individuals.”
In the refuge women are also procreating, but not with those who drove them to reside in this place. Their choices, their autonomy to make such choices, are what the state sees as a threat. Women should exist for man’s pleasure and the perpetuation of his genes.
This is remarkable writing that explores man’s proclivities and purported cleverness. Each relationship is shown to be one sided, supposed understanding a reflection of self. Man can draw the map and tinker around the edges of the detail, but how much of true note can be changed?
All of this is explored, dissected, and presented in language rich with depth and meaning. The conclusions are salient yet, when considered dispassionately, unsurprising. Man chooses to ignore so much in plain sight as he strokes his prejudices and vanities.
A book that soars and leaves a frisson in its contrails. A challenging, stunning, wholly satisfying creation. -
https://neverimitate.wordpress.com/2018/07/24/book-review-three-dreams-in-the-key-of-g/
Hidden amongst the words and paragraphs of Three Dreams In the Key Of G is a secret code that is begging to be deciphered. It’s there, the ultimate thesis Marc Nash wants us to take away from his story, I can see it. But, every time I thought I had a good grasp on it, Nash moved us to a different perspective and I had to start all over again. Three Dreams is a very interesting book, one that I’ll be pondering for a long time, but ultimately left me hanging.
I wish I could give you the exact plot of the book. I know it has to do with three characters: a mother, an older woman whom might be the head of a cult, and DNA. The book weaves between the three of them, the Mother telling us her story through her diary, the old woman, Jean, writing in her blog, and DNA speaking to us with its different genome sequences.
Their stories are told through a rambling stream of conscious. Thoughts jump from one thing to the next, sometimes going off on a tangent before settling on a point they were trying to make pages before. Some of the passages are beautiful, highlighting Nash’s mastery of the English language. It’s just too bad they are hidden amongst a slog of sentences that bog down the beauty.
I’m not the biggest fan of stories written in this style. I can appreciate the work. Nash’s ability to find three unique and fully realised voices is top notch. I just have a hard time following the train of thought, sometimes getting lost on one path before realising the narrator has moved on to something else.
At times I found it easier to let the words flow and see if I could discern what was important. Maybe that’s the reason why Nash wrote it in this style, forcing the reader to determine what they want to get out of the story. I’m all for a story making me work, but at times it didn’t feel like the effort was worth it.
It’s not all incoherent. The Mother’s section is the most grounded of the three. Through the intimacy of her journal we are instantly connected to her and her thoughts on motherhood. She lays it all out, the mundane, the wonderful, and the heartbreaking. She lays herself bare holding nothing back. The questions she pose are probably the same ones every parent has asked. Did she say the right thing? Who should she invite to a birthday party? What will the children think of her when they are older?
The other two characters have the more wild and unpredictable stories. At times they were fun, at other times they were more confusing.
Jean works at a women’s clinic and believes that men are the cause of all the problems of the world. She has an idea of removing the Y chromosome from DNA to eventually fill the world with just females. Cool, I get that. It’s a neat concept that I think would be awesome to explore. But, she is so focused on being smart and cute on her blog that it just comes across as someone that wants attention. She alludes to the clinic being under siege by the FBI, but we never truly get to see it. Which leads me to wondering if it was true or it was just something she made up for her blog.
Then we have DNA defending its right to protect its secrets. Which gives us a sort of trial situation, with DNA on the stand defending itself through bizarre typography and layout styles. Nash uses a lot of unique word choices, digging deep into the dictionary and thesaurus to give DNA a smarmy attitude. It feels a bit like a Word-of-the-day calendar, which can be fun but can also pull you out of the story.
When I was done with Three Dreams In The Key Of G I was exhausted. My brain felt like it had been through an intense workout. Nash is at the top of his game with this amazing feat of fiction. I don’t know if it’ll be for everyone, stream of conscious stories are definitely an acquired taste. But, the ideas presented in here make it worth the effort and time you’ll put into reading it. - Matt Brandenburg
storgy.com/2018/09/04/book-review-three-dreams-in-the-key-of-g-by-marc-nash/
Dead Ink is a Liverpool based publisher (part of the Northern Fiction Alliance) and their previous output includes the acclaimed anthology Know Your Place, Gary Budden’s debut collection Hollow Shores, as well as Harry Gallon’s first two novels (click here to see my review of his debut, The Shapes of Dogs Eyes, for Open Pen) and the absolutely astounding Sealed by Naomi Booth, which has been my go-to fiction recommendation since I read it.
DIGRESSION: Sealed is a post apocalyptic novel about a disease which causes a sufferer’s skin to seal over their bodily orifices – think Cormac McCarthy’s The Road but with more dread and less violence; think The Rover, think Children of Men, think of a *perfect* popular novel – both plot-driven and characterful, its omission from the Man Booker list a travesty. However, the fact that it made this year’s shortlist of the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize (last year won by Winnie M Lee’s Dark Chapter) is some consolation for Dead Ink. That accolade, however, is both diminished and expanded by the presence of a SECOND Dead Ink book on the same award shortlist: this one. Yes, that’s right: fan of TriumphoftheNow.com Marc Nash has been shortlisted for the Not the Booker Prize for his complex, experimental, novel, Three Dreams In The Key of G.
Nash’s latest is a multi-part text that includes three narrators, one of whom is a young mother in a loyalist household in Ulster at the turn of the millennium. The second narrator is an old woman facing off, online, against the amassed forces of the United States’ various law enforcement agencies. She is typing within a Floridian refuge for victims of male abuse (both women and gay men) where they are attempting to edit the human genome to forever destroy the male gender. The third strand – and the one that, for me, kept me from falling in “book love” with Three Dreams in the Key of G – is a discursive and digressive monologue that supposedly comes from the psyche of the human genome itself. As the book went on and these sections reappeared, I kept hoping for a connection to the other threads that was as thematically and emotionally powerful as the links between the young and the old women. And I didn’t find it.
All three sections of the novel are written with a wider vocabulary than my own, and this is something that generally turns me off a novel. I have two English degrees (#catchphrase) and read (on average) two books a week, so when a word I don’t know occurs in a novel that isn’t technical jargon (which is allowed) or its meaning isn’t obvious from the context, I’m secure in stating that it’s the writer either intentionally showing off or accidentally forgetting his readers. And, yes, it is usually his: women who know big words don’t tend to have the insecurities that plague excessively polysyllabic men. But, with Nash’s novel, I got over my linguistic disapproval: even though these characters speak with language that (a few too many times) prevents understanding on a sentence level (I’m not using a dictionary when reading English-language fiction, I’m almost 30 years old), Nash successfully evokes two complex characters, both of whom are in vastly different locations and linked, purely, by a shared history of poor relationships. Both are mothers, both identify as British2 (even though one was born on Ireland), and both speak with a similarly intellectual, though unrehearsed, voice.
The themes of these two narrators connect: the violence and incompetence of men, the unfairness of conservative ideals of motherhood, the value of private thought and learning… They gel together, as separate narratives, in a coherent and interesting way, drawing attention to different parts of the other. The third part, however, often felt to me like little more than intellectual filler, and maybe it was the language and the sentence structure and the deliberate and never-unmasked lack of humanity to the voice, but I failed to slip into a satisfying engagement with the voice, with its opinions and interpretations. And I think this was the problem: the voice spoke opinions and interpretations rather than feelings and emotions, and I can’t go for that (no can do).
I was expecting, or hoping, that the three threads would neatly tie together by the novel’s end, each revealed to be the same woman at different stages of her life, perhaps, or – preferably – something more unexpected than that. Although the disconnect between the sections in Ulster and Florida always remains (geographically), the two narratives humanely and engagingly explore similar ideas. The talking genome thread, though, with a bolshy, lecturer, tone of condescension, never clicked with me – right until the end I was hoping for a reveal that would emotionally justify its inclusion, but for me this didn’t happen. It was disappointing for me, because I felt that two thirds of this novel were great, and able to incorporate an exploration of humanity into the kind of clever-person-writing that usually makes me roll my eyes and write another poo poem.
I thoroughly enjoyed two thirds of Three Dream in the Key of G, and maybe a more intelligent reader (or a reader less interested in emotionality) might get more out of the genome sections than I did. However, for me this was a novel that spent a full third of itself doing all the things I don’t like a novel to do.
Still, the two thirds I liked were good. -
https://triumphofthenow.com/2018/09/01/three-dreams-in-the-key-of-g-by-marc-nash/
Marc Nash, The Death of the Author (in
Triplicate), Corona Samizdat, 2023
A trine cycle produced by three authors. A senior investigating officer is on his way to a fresh murder. In his crisis of faith, he questions the material nature of evidence and the abstract judicial system. The dead body signposts a crime scene staged with symbols of the divine interred in one of the four elements constituting the material universe. In part 2, a widow and a literary agent are having a heated phone exchange about the fate of her late husband's manuscript. In 3, an author is talking down all his sticky notes, twine and graph paper for the book he has just completed, pondering his next steps, anticipating questions such as where he gets his ideas from, a paradox set against the mundane act of sitting at his desk...readers must trace the leap into a work of imagination.
Marc
Nash has published five collections of flash fiction and four novels,
all of which look to push narrative form and language. He also works
with videographers to turn some of his work into digital
storytelling. He lives and works in London in the NGO realm.
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