The importance of (not) being Morrissey! [Part IV]

 

Well, pop figures, as somewhat vaguely hinted at in our recent past, we come to a Part IV on all things His Miz and his autobiography - a testament to both who he actually is, for those (i.e. almost all of us) who didn't know, as well as to who he most clearly isn't - but nevertheless he remains the (former?) enigma known to the world simply as Morrissey. Our old pal, Morrissey Sullen, no less!

  

The man has been, is, and no doubt will remain a classical agent provocateur - but the kind who will in an unguarded moment even laugh at his own outpourings due to the extremity of their content, but all the while insisting that he is being serious. This is naturally par for the course with the Mozness, and one is left to attempt to filter out which comments are real and which are said perhaps purely for their shock value.

 

"All I said was bring me the head of Elton John. Which is one instance in which meat would not be murder. If it were served on a plate."

 

It's a dank, dark pool and it is not clear how much  merit there is in staring into the murky depths to determine if there is an Atlantis-like oasis buried deep beneath the surface, where  shimmering waves of warming light burn through the chilly liquid darkness. Even the most hardened of salvage workers or rescuers have to give up when there is no hope left. Whether there is truly any light hidden within will remain a mystery to the masses, and only a tiny handful of closer confidantes can possibly know how pervasive the blackness inside Mister Moz is, at any given time. Let's ask Linder Ludus!

 

A great deal of it might be an act that has been so well practised and polished over the centuries that it became a way of life; one that served very well in keeping media attention at an ongoing level for a lot of the time. This is not a man who has ever shyed away from attention - he has courted it all of his life, one way or another. He would of course be totally unknown today if it were not for Johnny Marr, who held his hand through The Smiths until he could no longer stand to be in the same room as that hand, all in a few short years.

 

Such as it is, when it was. But, is the reverse also true? It's a particularly perspicacious question - would we know of Johnny Marr today had it not been for Le Miz? Perhaps ironically, I don't think that the reverse is true - a guitarist with the talent and pop sensibilities that Johnny possessed back in the fertile 80s would almost certainly have come to the fore in one format or another. Mancunia had a very networked musical community back then and Johnny was already known locally, prior to The Smiths. Someone famous would have snapped him up at one time or another, had he not risen to individual prominence beforehand.

 

I think that fact has not held our Moz back; he is nothing if not an opportunist, and The Smiths had placed his eccentric, egocentric, extremist persona on an international stage - one that allowed him to use it as a springboard for a solo career after the storm. His acute ambition in fact propelled him to almost immediate attention as a solo performer, while Johnny seemed content to become somewhat more of a muso; hangin' with some big names and gaining credibility as a "serious" guitarist rather than as that guy who plays in that indie band.

 

The Mozman has stayed very true to himself, in life as well as in the story of his life - one cannot argue with that. That presumably helps him sleep at night, even if some (many) of the things he says about other people are designed to hurt to an extent that one imagines him chuckling at the thought of them losing sleep over him. While I find it amusing a lot of the time, especially when his target is members of the Royal Family (an entirely justifiable target by the way), it comes across a lot less humorously when it's "friends" or collaborators or key musicians with whom he has worked.

 

Thus his description of Sarah Ferguson as the "Duchess of Nothing" is unquestionably bang-on and reflects what the masses think of "that ridiculous creature" (the term which the Queen apparently used in reference to Diana) who used to be wed to Buckingham Palace. You simply cannot paint a more beautiful picture of that creature than El Mizery does - "A little bundle of orange crawling out of a frothy dress, the drone of Sloane"- isn't it wonderful?!  

 

But the put-downs of Smiths bandmates come across as equally vicious, but are perhaps more revealing: Andy Rourke "an overgrown house plant"; Mike Joyce "an adult impersonating a child"; Johnny Marr "safely tucked away as everyone's friend, yet no one's". Dealing with the last, first, well I think it is abundantly clear that jealousy is at the heart of that comment, because The Miz wanted Johnny to be his friend, and no one else's.

 

Quite how much M&M were in bed together in the money-grabbing activities of Smithdom, or how much of it was pure Moz, with Johnny not being aware or turning a blind eye to it all, will remain known only to them I imagine. At the same time, I never heard of Johnny refusing any excess money or questioning the 40-40-10-10 split, ever, so Mozzer may have a point that they were in it together, and Johnny merely/conveniently allowed the wisdom of His Misdom to rule the day. It made sense I guess, as long as the cash kept on a-rolling.

 

Once the two "worker" Smiths sued, according to Morrissey, Johnny simply threw up his hands as if it had all been the work of ol' Mizeltoe himself, and Johnny got to play loyal friend sitting beside "the other side" in court. If that is true, it belies the very image of Marr that he himself has portrayed of being the good guy in a nasty story - one who was always behind Andy and Mike seeing some of the hard-earned cash. But if that were indeed the case, why did he need a court to tell him how much Mike should be paid, and why did he settle with Andy for an outrageously insulting amount of petty cash to shut him up? 

 

There's always two sides to every story, and every divorce, but in this case the two sides are represented by Morrissey&Marr, and Rourke&Joyce. Let's not forget that the latter took both members of the former to court, even though it was comfortingly portrayed as a suit against only The Mozziah. It seems they were both in it together, but one was willing to admit to it all and even justify it, willingly, while the other tried to sneak away from it - presumably with his own stash as intact as possible. Uh huh.

 

One is compelled to think of other scenarios of dominant duos in famous bands, and how the classical "other two" were treated, fiscally. I never heard of any legal action by Jones and Bonham, against Page and Plant. Ditto Wyman and Watts against Jagger and Richards. Nor for that matter, Topper Headon and Paul Simonon against Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. One can only presume then that either these other prolific duos were very fair to their "other two"s, or, at worst, they did grab more of the cash than was their due but were above board about it and it was legally clarified to all concerned. I suspect it is more likely to be the former possibility, though.

 

I would probably come out a lot more in favour of Biz Mizery's view on things were it not for the extent of the put-downs. Andy Rourke may or may not have his flaws as a person (and who doesn't, including bigmouth?) but to describe the man who put down some incredible bass playing on all major Smiths output as "an overgrown house plant" is almost criminal. I don't care if he couldn't express himself verbally at a level with the guy standing to his left on stage; he didn't need to! He made an enormous contribution at a musical level to those songs, he is an artist, not a public speaker or politician, and if he had addiction problems or attitude problems, it sure as hell didn't impact his recorded playing. He expressed himself through his music, and that oughta be enough for any musician.

 

The outright hatred for Mike Joyce is perhaps more understandable; not least because Joycey hit him in his virtual heart - his wallet - and hard. If I were to adopt a Mizzery-style clarity of vision in a put-down of him? Well, I might vouchsafe that one reason the man appears to be so different from other humanoids is because in the end, it is entirely possible that he is in fact an alien! He doesn't have a traditional heart, rather there is one cavernous muscular wallet beating inside his chest, and when it is bulging with cash the creature is usually on fine form, but if it is low in cash, or God forbid, cash has actually been forcefully removed (stolen) from it, well, watch out!

 

Yes, an alien that landed which was supposed to live among us, spreading its evil-doing seed among the populus, procreating with wild abandon until the alien race ruled the world. Well, we all know how that went wrong, right? It turns out that the alien went rogue, refusing to even indulge in the weakness of the flesh typical of our species, but instead focused on some of the other deadly sins, i.e. greed, wrath, envy and pride, to name but a few. The rogue alien was not guilty of classical lust, per se,  and in fact shunned it, but was consumed by a lust for attention, recognition and fame, and the spoils that came with it.

 

If a camera lens ever focused on another Manchester indie star before him, to this day, there seems to be a lust and a greed and an envy and a pride bigger than humanly imaginable seething out of every one of his pores. I hope he recognises that at least I have not accused him of either sloth or gluttony! Five out of seven ain't bad though! One can just imagine how the leaders of the alien race viewed their experiment at implanting a humanoid-like singularity among us, to take over the world.

 

"What the f--k is he doing? He was not programmed to be the lead singer and head whiner in some miserable godamn indie band from Manchester! You can't have an invading race being associated with something called Smith! We need him to procreate with anything that moves and spread our no-good evil-doing seed! He wants to be famous? He's whaaat? Celibate? Gay? Miserable? Go get me the guy who is in charge of programming these androids, cos he is out of a job! This excuse for an alien has gone rogue, and has become a humanoid; one with all of their vices and vanities!"

 

Before I overstay my welcome once again, let me come to some form of closure on the matter at hand. The most unavoidable conclusion writ large not only between the lines but also screaming out from the lines of Morrissey's life story is that he at least pretends to be a roundly unhappy character, even today. There is so much focus on darkness and his mizery, and so little focus on the bright side of the road and on the joys of this wonderful life - coming from one who has led a rather privileged life, free of the true blackness of working class slavery from whence he came, well, it all seems so ungrateful.

 

Not once did I read of any out-and-out thank yous to those who bought all his music and put him into the life of comfort he leads today, while the  working class works on. That would be his working class, by the way. No doubt he feels that we owed him all of that, and more, and we should be grateful that he deigned to share his diary with us all, loyal Smiths fans through and through - a diary which we are all expected to shell out for again and concurrently fill out those antique stuffed sofas some more.

 

I personally felt that he somewhat skated over the halcyon days of The Smiths (what we bought the book for!), and presumably due to his own twisted agenda, focused a good 40-50 pages on Mike Joyce (rather a lot for someone considered as interchangeable as lawnmower parts?) rather than the glory that was Der Smythes. Then we race on to hectic solo tour diary vignettes - almost as if he never did detail what happened weekly/monthly with The Smiths, due to a combination of being so young (feeling it would go on forever) where one is always thinking ahead, not to what has passed, and/or, a conscious decision not to share those times with us due to his wrath over the whole affair.

 

The only obvious deduction from Morrissey's story, pop figures, is that stardom, fame, media attention, cameras, treading the boards, reaching enormous musical heights, and even being filthy rich, do not happiness create. It seems that all that those things have done is converted the rather endearing depression of late teenage youth into a more fully realised/expressed adult misery - even after breaking free of the purported reasons for that depression, escaping that life, and rather amazingly for a Whalley Range-trolling scallywag, living among the palm trees in the elite sunny warmth of Hollywood. Quite rarefied air, indeed.

 

But one must find happiness in the little things in life, n'est-ce pas? Not for us the worries and woes of fame and famine, with million dollar lawsuits and the agony of having to pay someone what they are rightfully owed, and all that nonsense. We, as the human race, must wake up and smell the coffee, and the gladioli (or roses, if you prefer), and be grateful that the masterplan of the alien race failed due to the idiosyncrasies of He who this world knows as Mozzery Mizery.

 

And that, dear friends, is one reason why we remain free today - thank heavens for The Smiths! Irrespective of the magnificence and transcendence of their musical output and what that did contribute to world peace/happiness, we simply must be grateful that a lifetime focused (to this day) on the inner workings of and perceived injustices in that band has distracted someone from enacting a bigger agenda. Again, thank heavens for The Smiths - they truly did save the world, after all! ;) - Kevin Mc

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tweep? T that can make you weep!

Here we are once again on one of our fave subjects/pet peeves - the contribution, utilisation and outright abuse of that supposedly revolutionary tool - social media. Yes, that tool, the one that has changed ordinary lives everywhere and seemingly turns everyone into their own mini-superstar species, where previously totally mundane thoughts or statements are now deemed fit for the masses - because people care! Hardly. 

The app that sees the most abuse is that old favourite, Twitter. I think the genius of Twitter was the addictiveness stealthily written into its code, as evidenced by the number of times I have read people stating that it is physically getting in the way of their lives and work, so they will be exiting Twitter at least temporarily, if not for the longer term. Freudian slip or not, there is meaning in the fact that the first four letters of Twitter spell t-w-i-t. In many ways the aforementioned genius of Twitter is the Twit in Twitter - it's the perfect forum on which twits everywhere can display, and that has begun to include various high profile celebs of late.

It's one thing for a superstar to let their followers know where they buy coffee, which restaurants they are patrons at (as if anyone else can afford it) and which brand of toilet paper is their preferred choice, and why. The sheep will always follow what an artificially elevated opinion (celebrity) says or does, and there is just something so comforting being in the bathroom and knowing that this lovely three-ply tissue is the same one that so-and-so uses on their bum too. Uh huh.

Don't get me started on the self-appointed (as well as mass-appointed) importance of celebrity in the modern world, because that's an entire story in and of itself. I want to focus on the abject non-celebrity-as-pseudo-celebrity species that is rampant on ol' Twits. You know who I mean, right? Yes, you or me. Him or her. Maybe Joe Public or Jane Dolittle. Someone with a sufficiently uninteresting life that an inordinate amount of time gets spent on Twitter making it sound or feel better, screaming out to no one in particular. 

This species is easy to find on Twitter, and there are a few easy-to-spot qualifiers that clinch the category. A very typical symptom is the number of followers vs those being followed - after initially being impressed that the person has a reasonable 1341 followers, one observes that they in turn follow 1893 individuals. Ah, okay. The follow-to-be-followed syndrome. If I follow you, will you be so kind to follow me back, even though neither of us have any idea who the other actually is, but that doesn't matter, right? We have zero interest in each other apart from wanting the follow to add to my total. How can anyone truly follow over a thousand individuals/entities anyway? It's a complete contradiction. 

Another key sign is the weight given to the number of followers, seemingly irrespective of how many one is following. On more than one occasion I have even seen proud celebratory (sounds like celebrity!) statements regarding the achievement of "my 1000th follower", even though that is completely normal for anyone following a few thousand people. But if one focuses only on number of followers, well, we are our very own little mini-celebrity and people listen to what we have to say! Actually, not. 

Once this impressive level of pseudo-celebrity has been achieved, what comes next is the mini-Godhead (i.e. any typical rock star) syndrome, where one suddenly does a 180, and begins to believe that even the most normal and mind-crushingly mundane aspects of a normal life are of any significance whatsoever to other normal people living their similarly insignificant lives. Before all the do-gooders and finger pointers begin to yelp, let me clarify things by classifying the term "insignificant" to mean in terms of to anyone beyond close friends and family. 

In other words, where you decide to brunch to help soothe last night's hangover is of about as much public interest as that pimple on your bum. Well, no, actually, if you were to stick a pic of that up on Instagram/Twitter and it's a desired bum, well, now maybe that could take you viral! But you get my point. A particularly offensive aspect of the Godhead syndrome is the soon-to-be-a-criminal-offence habit of putting up pics of plates of food or even empty plates from this supposed hot spot, or that one, or even, God forbid, from the boyfriend's kitchen table. 

This is such an offensive act that it should come with a mandatory period of (Twitter) incarceration as punishment, if the social media police can find you. Such offenders should be put into a padded cell with ten 42" LED screens on the walls that display nothing but food pics from all over the world, with typically inane 140 character drivel beneath them spoken out loud by the latest text-to-voice software. "This empty plate shows just how good the food is at Bistro X!" and "I am so lucky to have such a BF, look what he did earlier this evening!" (presumably not least because she can barely boil water herself) or "Currently at Sushi Y with six others. Check this amazing sashimi, people!" Yawn.

The unwritten text being "I am so hip and cool", naturally. It's not about anyone caring, or wanting to know, or the Twit wanting to share their keen insight and clinically good taste with the masses; rather it's an attempt to point out how hip and cool they are, and please feel free to comment accordingly below my post. But therein lies the rub, dear friends. When you do look to see who is waiting with baited breath for them to post something/anything, well, quite tragically (not) one observes that typically, nobody seems to notice or care. Occasionally you will see a "Cool! We were there last Saturday night, at the re-launch party prior to opening night, it was awesome!" and we all know what the subtext of that kind of response is, right?

Another sickening trend among the Twit wannabes is that godawful hashtag verbosity that pervades the medium today. The second I see this malaise, I mark the person as a total Twit pretender and I move on. What am I talking about exactly? I will give you an example - "Hanging out with the chef/owner at Bar Z, love this place! #Toronto #Cool Bars #Saturday Night #Food #Drinks #Restaurants #R&R #Buzzed #Hotspots". I don't know what it is about this habit that makes those who do it feel somehow cool or hip, because it simply marks them as classical Twits. Not least due to having a clear lack of anything resembling "content" to fill up the 140 character space with, so better fill it up with nausea-inducing additions to their hashtagged little lives. 

You actually see this bad habit used by a lot of wannabes who work in the PR and communications fields, and they truly should know better. They are supposed to know that cool social media is not only about content, which is key in and of itself, but more specifically it is useful content that counts. Not hashtagged gibberish masquerading as cool content. But adding in multiple related hashtags apparently implies a kind of Twits "sophistication", so folks pile them on, when in fact they actually exhibit a clear and total lack of articulation sophistication. The great irony being that it is these very people who tout their social media expertise and are even charged with handling the social media profiles of various accounts. Check their profiles, see how magnificently average and uncreative they are, and move on, people! 

Furthermore, these are often people who also create Twitter accounts for their pets (don't get me started on that, puh-leaaase!), and that kind of says it all, I'm afraid. Once we get non-humanoid non-language speaking creatures running around Twitter barking to us about their lives, well, it's clearly the end of the world as we know it, and they feel fine. I imagine. This is a key point though - anyone who makes the time to create and update a Twitter profile for an animal truly needs to get a real life and stop being a Twit. Make that Total Twit. It's staggeringly underwhelming, and it should be illegal for any so-called adult beyond their teens to create an account for an animal - for anyone beyond the age of thirty it should come with an automatic ban from Twitter.  

Here at EU we are in the publishing world, and we see our fair share of the Twit phenotype in this area also. Stereotypically, perhaps, it's  kind of a cutesy club of bored housewives (but erstwhile new authors) who join forces in a mutually exclusive (and mutually sycophantic) support group. It's all threaded with a palpable need for attention, with a million cutesy comments about chocolate, drinking, candies, lack of sleep, the blank page, the next chapter and so on, and on. We are so cool, because we are writers! Indeed.

But even there, you detect a hierarchy that is based on who actually has a book deal, and therefore is a real writer. (S)he is the leader of the pack, and knows it, and is often the most guilty of self-aggrandising Twits-4-attention posts, and the masses gush with virtual affection at even the most banal of statements such as "I have started Chapter 4 of my new old-adult sci-fi romance! Who's excited?!" I find it all to be so suspect, because the Queen is only there to taste adulation from her (not so) loyal subjects, who are in turn only there to try to get their own deal, maybe after a year or two of kissing some royally published a**. 

We at EU didn't want to be involved in any of that nonsense, and right from the start refused offers to join in, and join the club, or take advice from some completely self-appointed self-publishing "gurus" who expect to be at the centre of the sheep Twitterverse, and God forbid, even extract a price for their "services" from totally lost sheep. I feel real sympathy for anyone who bought their line that social media marketing was the way to sell their book (not a lie, per se) and that the guru knew how to do it - for a price. Taking courses from someone on new media where there are almost no rules, little professionalism and the crux of the matter being one word - communication - is just plain crazy! Show me a "writer" who cannot communicate in writing on social media, and I will show you someone who clearly cannot write! Better keep that day job, after all. 

And you know, more than in almost any other form of entertainment, true writers are almost exclusively not those who need/seek media attention or a world watching their every move. One reason they became writers was to work away from society, in their own space and on their own time, based on a world that exists primarily only in their own heads. These are not the people you see in the Twitter support groups, because they are too busy, wait for it,  actually writing. What a concept!  I guess there are those who do, and those who spend all day (and night) talking about doing.

Writers are supposed to be mysterious creatures, hidden away from the world. I cannot think of anything more demystifying than to hear all the boring stops and starts of even a famous author on their next book. How exciting can it be to hear someone scrapped a new chapter, or hit a block at the 35,000th word, or plot-boarded three new novels in one single week? Uh huh. We don't want any part in such shenanigans, or in any of the sins outlined above, and if that somehow makes us look less hip, well, we can surely live with that and we will continue to sleep deep at night. 

The Twit-o-sphere is alive and well, and I guess as long as it exists, it will be the masses who dominate it, and, well, everyone seems to want to be a star. Such is the cult of celebrity in 2014 society, and if I can feel like a celebrity by hashtagging, and foodie pic posting, and letting the world know where I am at any given moment on a Friday night, then I will. Just don't show up there, just don't remind me that none of my 2,000 "followers" ever seem interested enough to respond, and don't tell me that I am up to a whopping 6,000 posts - sent primarily to, take a deep breath, myself. 

It is the outright equivalent of virtual self-flagellation and online masturbation: talking to oneself, about oneself, to pleasure oneself. In fact, I am giving masturbation a bad name, because that is usually done in honour of another (in our heads), whereas the millions of premature ejaculations seen on Twits are the output of people pleasuring themselves in front of a mirror. That's really something else, and it should be outlawed by the social media police, in order to make Twitter a safer, healthier place to be.

Can we all just go back to worshiping real celebrities on Twitter, and listening to their output and opinion on all subjects of interest, and ban individuals with nothing to say from commenting? As Morrissey once said, most people have nothing to say of any interest or significance whatsoever, and even though I suspect he was being typically provocative, one cannot help but feel that he was totally on the mark. Bullseye, in fact!

On that note, I don't suppose I dare elaborate on which exotic dark roast I have sourced for my Sunday morning coffee this weekend? I would be committing a sin of a most heinous nature, but then again, this is my blog, it's not Twitter, so then that doesn't count, right? Well, "quit while you're ahead" might be the best philosophy on this one, mister! Okay. Done! ;) - Kevin Mc

Where do EU and Penguin Canada run into each other? In the troubled Waters of ARCHETYPE, of course!

   

How often do you listen to that little voice in your head? Yes, that one, the one that can often be impossible to silence, especially when we are weighing our options in contentious or challenging circumstances. One of the most interesting aspects of our "little voice" is its capacity to push us to act or move in ways that are not aligned or maybe even totally parallel to our "normal" selves. It can be the dark side to our much lighter selves, or even the brighter side to our darker selves, but the most daunting factor about it is its capacity to keep hammering on at us, even (or especially) in the silence of night. 

We all seem to have different levels of chatterboxes inside our heads, in that some people barely notice it while others have it rattling on all the time, but the point is - we all seem to have one. How many of us can honestly say that we never talk to ourselves? When we physically talk to ourselves are we actually talking back to that little voice? Do we actually need to discuss ourselves with the inner voice and seek approval, or are we often dueling with that voice and telling it to be quiet, because we are going to do this or that, or say this or that?

The more intriguing question is, of course, where does this duality come from? Dueling with our duality is not an uncommon phenomenon in humanoids, and it's a very confounding experience. With an outside world full of rivalry, competition and even conflict, what could possibly make us fight with ourselves? Well, Penguin Canada seem to find such questions of interest also and one of their new authors, MD Waters , seems to have some of the answers - maybe! 

In her hot debut novel, ARCHETYPE , we get introduced to Emma, an accident victim who wakes with the equivalent of a neural scrape, with no apparent memory or even identity remaining, leaving the repainting of the blank canvas to her husband Declan; he has to colour in the vague outline of an empty shell of a life that is the new Emma. As much as the newly reframed image appears to take shape and makes sense, there is a nagging inner voice that haunts Emma, and she begins to have nightmarish flashbacks that question the story of her life as laid down by Declan. She begins to hear commentary by "Her": it's an inner voice that seems to know, and thus begins a war of words between Declan and she-who-will-not-be-silenced. 

It's a very interesting premise (even if the waking as an empty shell is not entirely novel) and none of us can imagine how shocking it would be to wake and have our previous identity removed from our brain, then being force-fed some version of our story that might be both comforting and contradictory at the same time. But Emma allows herself to become intertwined into Declan and their purported shared life and love, yet is also drawn to the handsome Noah who becomes her lover. "Her" seems to trust Noah more, which is a source of torment for Emma, because she too cannot dismiss him and commit exclusively to her "new" husband Declan. She truly becomes torn between two lovers in a fashion that underlines the concept of simultaneously being two related individuals at one and the same time. 

MD Waters weaves a scientifically futuristic landscape where fertile women are a hot commodity of increased value in a society where men greatly outnumber women, and where East and West are in conflict in North America. Women in the West are free but those in the East have more in common with a new form of slavery, being trained for becoming wives and mothers. It might be viewed as a contemporary version of those Stepford Wives, perhaps, or maybe it's the final chapter in that age old struggle for dominance/equivalence between men and women. It's not so much a brave new world as a bleak new world, and we don't learn much about how we got there, but that's not the point, right?! 

Although I found the story a little slow to break into, and the characters remained charcoal sketches rather than full blown colour pictures, that may have been the point! The story is being told from the one with the blank slate for a life, so in a sense it is entirely natural that we may occasionally feel as lost as she did. We get more time to begin to figure things out for ourselves, or so we think, until MD Waters hits us from behind with shocker unexpected twists and turns. While I had some trouble developing empathy for Emma as a character, it is accurate to state that Emma herself didn't know who she was, so then how could we? One has to go on her journey with her, buy into it, give into it, and like she, try to make some sense of it all and figure our her truth. 

The story is rather unusually told in first person narrative, but that can work well in certain cases such as "The Wasp Factory" by Iain Banks, or Barbara Kingsolver's "Poison Wood Bible", or even A QUIET RESIGNATION , by our very own Kevin Mc! It's not often that a book makes me think in such detail about what lies within, and how it got there, and where do our other voices, images and dreams truly arise from; while some choose reincarnation as their theme, MD Waters explores a more science-based origin for our duality, and as scientists here at EU, well, we just love her take on things! 

We won't give away the punchline by going into too much detail about Emma's origins, but like life itself, it's all in the DNA! Who knows if we are already in some kind of future dystopia and we are "born" sharing our DNA sequence with another entity that remains part and parcel of us - able to communicate with us by being intimately intertwined with and wound into us via the sacred double helix that we share? Actually, it is the unwinding of that intertwined DNA and the separation of selves encoded therein that is a fundamental in the story of Emma Burke - that is the journey we go on with her.

In her first novel (of a two book series), MD Waters manages to create something very stimulating out of an initially blank canvas (Emma), and that is quite appropriate for someone who began her own journey on Archetype with a blank page and a keyboard in front of her! I am pretty certain that many other readers will already be similarly hooked and waiting anxiously for the 2014 follow-up prequel, PROTOTYPE - is it just my own wild imagination or are more and more women in town sporting luckenbooths on their left hands, in some form of alliance with Emma?!

Let's hope that Penguin doesn't make us wait too much longer to find out more! Okay, that's it for this one, and let me say that it's been a pleasure for EU to have been a part of the PENGUIN CANADA blog tour for ARCHETYPE - we really enjoyed the opportunity! By way of thanks to MD Waters herself, well, we will close it out with a request to her publisher using a line said by a certain Evelyn to DJ Dave Garver, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Monterey - "Play Misty for me...." 
Kevin Mc + Cristina Ciurli = EU ;)