Norman Lock has chosen a crucial time in the history of our world--those incandescent years just before World War I came to destroy a generation--when Modernism was being born; when possibility seemed limitless; when Freud, Einstein, the Wright Brothers and even Woolworth were changing the way in which civilization would function. But rather than prowling the capitals of Europe, as so many American expatriates did, mingling with "Apollonaire and Jarry, Rousseau and Satie" [p. 140] in situ, Lock seats his American narrator N in what must have appeared to contemporaries as a final frontier, "darkest Africa," and brings great personalities of the early twentieth century to N. For, as both cover and title page note, Lock's book is not a *history* of imagination and creativity, it is a novel--history as imagination might wish it had been. And even as Freud was changing what we *knew* the mind to be, and Einstein was changing what we knew the universe to be, and Heisenberg was changing what we knew knowing to be, Lock's Africa is a place of indeterminacy, of magic: a place in which Prince (not yet King) Kong can dress elegantly and woo N's own paramour; or N himself, with knowledge gained from African healers, can raise a dead colleague, only to find the colleague extraordinarily incensed at returning to life.

Lock's *History* is both Modernist and post-modern: wry, witty, dour and even silly in a very contemporary way; and yet as wide-eyed, incisivie, erudite and open to the world of dreams as the Modernists and surrealists were. There is an archness, a deliberate overplaying of vocabulary and emotion that recalls the most intelligent aspects of contemporary popular culture, but in a setting and with characters that popular culture wouldn't touch, characters full of ideas and an eagerness to discuss them, often using their sly and sardonic manners to disguise (or heighten?) the earnestness of their intentions and emotions. When, for example, N tells Stravinksy that "We live our lives by accident," Stravinsky "hotly" replies, "Not our art!" N thinks, "That, too, will come, but I did not tell him so. He was on the edge, and I had to wish to nudge him over." Lock is looking forward to an artistic climate yet decades away, but Stravinsky is focused on the more immediate future: "War will be the death of many things... Faberge eggs, the fluted columns of the classical age, ragtime." (p. 185)

One sleepless night, N takes a walk "into time. The wind shrieked inside me; the rain drizzled through the tree of my blood. The starry night was an x-ray film showing the sickness of the world Marie Curie dazzled by radium computed the arithmetic of decay on the abacus of her bones."

But the losses to come, the devastation of an entire worldview in brutal combat, is not always treated so lightly. Not many pages later, N travels back to Cincinnati ("with the King of Belgium on his private steamship"--perhaps an allusion to *Heart of Darkness* and the crimes of Belgium in the Congo) to attend the funeral of the last passenger pigeon. "In truth," N bluntly confesses, "I did not care that the last passenger pigeon was dead. In Africa I had eagerly helped to finish off several species of fauna." (p. 208) But this apparent cold-heartedness is tempered shortly thereafter in a conversation N has with "you." You are objecting that, since N's history is an alternate history, he should have made the pigeon live. N replies, blithely "but with a growing unease," that "I wanted to write about a funeral. I wanted to write how the King of Belgium and Sousa came to Cincinnati and stood in the rain.

"You: Monster!

"I: What is one bird, even the last bird of its kind, next to the millions of our kind who would shortly begin to die? I did not want to write *that* history." (p. 212)

And so Lock's persistent, but often offstage, concern with the destructiveness of the twentieth century comes sharply to the fore. Is there an implication here of escapism? Or is it rather idealism, or even something like Hardy's sometime desire to ameliorate life? As N says of the dead of World War I: "I could do nothing for them." And to be approach the issue more broadly, civilization is not uniquely responsible for the sorrow of life. Einstein, in the throes of his nervous breakdown, comes to Africa to recuperate. "Done with lines that bent" (p. 85), he wants to travel in a straight line and measure things with his ruler. But when he and N stop for the night in a village, Einstein plays his violin and the villagers "sat in a ring and wept at the sadness of the music. They called it 'sorrowing'.

"Albert lifted his bow from the strings and entreated them. 'Will you let me teach you arithmetic?'

" 'No,' they said, 'teach us to play the sorrowing'."

Even the so-called primitives know the sadness that permeates N, though, unlike him, they long to immerse themselves in it.

But *A History of the Imagination* is not simply an elegy. There is enough pure delight in language to appeal to poetry readers as well. One sleepless night, N takes a walk "into time. The wind shrieked inside me; the rain drizzled through the tree of my blood. The starry night was an x-ray film showing the sickness of the world Marie Curie dazzled by radium computed the arithmetic of decay on the abacus of her bones." (p. 152) This beautiful reverie is intensified by the sorrow it annotates. Then N finds *The Book of Casualties*, the list of the dead to come. Appalled by his magnitude, he tries "to close the heavy book, but it would not close." Lock has used his language here as a tool of relief, in both senses: beautiful language relieves the sorrows of life by making such sorrows a kind of art, and likewise it explicates the sorrow, creating a bas-relief struck by the appropriate angle of sunlight.

If we accept sexuality as a metaphor for the continuation of life and war as the most violent metaphor for the Freudian longing for death, then Lock has quite successfully woven together the two contradictory impulses of human biology and psychology--the impulse into the future and the yearning to be done with it--in a most remarkable way.

In another place Lock consciously recalls T.S. Eliot's music, an occasion which serves to remind us of the place writers hold in our histories, even though few writers are onstage characters in *History*. N dreams he is with John Philip Sousa, hunting icebergs in a submarine (a response to the sinking of the *Titanic*, another reminder that life holds other dangers than war). When he hears "a lovely underwater passage," his current paramour echoes *Prufrock*: "What you hear is whales singing each to each." (p. 161) Later in the same chapter, after N and his lover have had ample opportunity to "play the shepherd's game" and N has joined in the iceberg hunt, he hears the icebergs singing and cries out, "Oh, you sirens!", completing the Eliot circle opened five pages earlier.

Another persistent theme of the history is N's sexuality: his long-term relationships with Anna and Mrs. Willoughby (later debauched by Kong) and his briefer dalliances with Fay Wray, Colette, and the unnamed she of the iceberg hunt. N's need for women is both primal and competitive, expressed playfully as he toys with his lover's ribbons and hopes to return to the shepherd's game and lustfully as he undresses the sleeping Mrs. Willoughby and studies her nakedness. "It was the nakedness of a woman in the prime of life, and I longed to embrace it." Even so, he has decided "not to make love to her while she slept. . . To my mind it smacked of necrophilia--a practice I despised." (p. 23)

If we accept sexuality as a metaphor for the continuation of life and war as the most violent metaphor for the Freudian longing for death, then Lock has quite successfully woven together the two contradictory impulses of human biology and psychology--the impulse into the future and the yearning to be done with it--in a most remarkable way. The brief quotations employed here can barely suggest the richness of Lock's language and tonal control, creating a voice that pulls the reader forward both because what he says is so intriguing and even oddball and because he says it is so vivid. When these strengths are intertwined with the profound emotion undergirding the story-N's deep sadness at man's inhumanity to man--the work which emerges is not simply engaging but also satisfying: a patent fiction which feels true. It is possible that Norman Lock in *A History of the Imagination* has created the first important English language debut of the twenty-first century, a book that may in decades to come resonate of our time as *The Waste Land* embodies its own. But if the tragedies of Africa, both in the real world and in Lock's, have taught us anything, it is that life continues, even surrounded by death.

"It is not craven to love the magical night! To love women and long for the arabesques of laughter and desire! I have hunted for death and almost found it. Tomorrow I shall go to Mombasa and buy a yellow vest. I shall find myself a lovely girl to be alone with in the trees.

"I stood up and mounted a small hill on the edge of the clearing and, throwing back my head [like Tarzan], I called to the elephants.

"The elephants trumpeted in answer." (p. 247)

Elephants? Ah, yes--the metaphor for memory.

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Cooper Renner also reviews books and engages in various critical activities for the online magazine 'elimae', under the name b. renner.