Write your abstract
here.
Enniscorthy Sweeney creates unusual fictions: they
replace
events in the real world and prevent them happening. Or
do
they?
DEPRESSION: A HORROR COMEDY has a ten year run on
Broadway,
from 1929 to 1939. Apparently in a period of widening
and
heightening prosperity, people like to escape into a
vividly realized world of clawing, desperate poverty.
PROHIBITION: A FARCE on the other hand is a failure.
Its
first week's run is a sellout, but the backers panic
and
close the show: everyone who attends leaves before the
first act to have the first of several drinks in the
theatre bar. Sweeney maintains the closure of the play
is
based on a misunderstanding: it would have continued to
sell out, audiences would have continued to stampede
for
the bar and a double fortune could have been made out
of
tickets and liquor sales.
But his masterworks (the third still in preparation as
the
novel commences) are the Armageddon Operas. The first
describes a war of unprecedented horror that didn't
happen
between 1914 and 1918; the next a war three times as
horrific that didn't happen between 1939 and 1945; the
third a war (with trimmings) nine times as horrific as
the
first, that hasn't not happened yet.
But if the wars never happened, why do so many people
(including Sweeney intermittently) have such vivid
memories
of them? well the healthiest societies have their
pockets
of insanity; even the healthiest individuals. Why are
so
many soldiers of these wars enrolled on the disability
pension list? well if you can think of a way to make
the
social security system more efficient, let us know. Why
do
rival societies, the World Peace League and the Friends
of
the Catastrophes (with demon and shapeshifter as well
as
human members)contend so fiercely about the meaning of
these imaginary conflicts? It seems a clear consensus
has
yet to be established (the span from 1964 to 1972 is so
confused in this respect that it has come to be known
as
the Empty Years or Years for Rent).
There's this to consider as well: the horrors of
Armageddon
3 are such that to depict them may be no different from
enacting them. Is this the end of the world then?
nobody's
acting as if it is; they arent acting as if it isn't
either.
They're acting as if they don't care one way or
another.