Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

CHARLES LAFAVE – GREETH – 2016

What an adventure in human life and decay, potential and waste !

Don’t believe I am going to tell you the story. I would just not be able to do so. It is too complicated with too many layers, both time and space layers, if not even existential layers between any two of the others. You can get lost in that labyrinth, underground and over ground, caves and jungle. Charles Lafave is telling us the end of humanity the way it has been forever and the birth of another humanity that is not even described apart from being in continuity and yet waiting for the return of that Peter Buraku who disappeared from the surface of the earth and yet …

The Japanese inspiration is obvious from the very start. We are beyond some war that enabled humans allied to wizards to defeat the negative forces of the water wizards who were exterminated and apparently to provide a strange fate to the Others who are supposed to be the scientific freaks of our world. The general idea is that every single category of beings has to come from another dimension through some portals that open only for a short period of time and then close. The whole story is about that other deeper dimension where life existed before the life we know, the mammals and the beings who wear their flesh onto of their skeleton.

This primeval and deeper layer is the realm of the exoskeleton, hence all bugs with carapaces. It is there a primal god exists, still exists and wants to come out to re-conquer the earth and the stake is for the humans who occupy that world after the war that exterminated the water wizards to stop this upcoming reinstatement of Greeth on earth, hence to keep it locked up behind its portals, though this underground life has reached the point when bugs are getting bipedal and of human size. To achieve that the supreme government, the Praesidium, is bringing together several people who will end up self-quarantined.

All of them except one, Peter, who has completely disappeared and they are all waiting for him, including the media.

We are the only one to know where he is. But I cannot reveal it.

What is important is that this novel is a cosmic and geological love affair and by love affair I mean a full intercourse between one being seen as male and one being seen as female. This world is dominated by women. The head of the Praesidium is a woman, Par Parabba. The primeval and primal geological original divinity is a goddess of some sort and the whole story is how this banned goddess of a long long time ago can be brought back to the surface of the earth without causing the end of human life. This Greeth has to be pacified and it can only be pacified with the sacrifice of one man who is going to be the male she is going to milk for ever in the underground lair where she will be kept. This intercourse will be the exchange for peace. You then understand the name of that Peter who has to be sacrificed for Humanity to build their temples and houses and societies on that stone he is in so many languages, and even in Peter that is built of the Latin root for stone (Pierre in French for example: petra for the stone and Petrus for the apostle).

The human world we see, confronted to the menace from Greeth, is a human world of total control, totalitarian dictatorship, assassinations, ninjas, wizards and sorcerers. Scientists of the Other species or not are nothing but manipulators of deadly procedures and materials with the sole aim to establish full control of life, not seeing that this full control of life kills life that can only survive with all kinds of wizardry and healing charms or fluids or whatever these wizards can invent. At the same time this dictatorial system under the “guidance” of Par Parabba and an army of ninjas, wizards and soldiers who are absolutely all supposed to obey first and think if they have time between their final fight and their death, is under the menace of all discontents who try to find an alliance with Greesh, though in vain. If the rank and file of ,this Par Parabba thinks too early they are put to death in one nanosecond, without even thinking or wondering about the finality and purpose of these deaths.

We must understand the male wizard captured by Greeth and becoming her milking mate accepts his mission and his fate because his love was swarted and rejected by the woman he loved. His only way to compensate for his frustration is to copulate with this archaic old goddess and become a god himself, the god of life at the geological, cosmic and primal life level, the life of insects, exoskeletal beings.

So, this novel is a genial mixture of several trendy influences. On one hand it is a horror Harry Potter who does not practice sorcery to do anything good, or bad as for that, but just to fulfill some kind of existential need to control and have power even if he has to submit to a bigger being to get that power that is nothing but an illusionary dream. On the other hand it is a magnified X-files adventure that does not state extraterrestrial beings but extra-human super-beings that are the living force in rocks and all kinds of bugs and insects that are seen as direct descendants from rock in fusion that still boils at the heart of this earth. The Fox Mulder of this story is a wizard for sure but also a dreamer who is trying to think he is responsible for all evil things happening to his friends and the people around him. He is paranoid and self-centered to the acme of egotistic selfish selflessness: what a vain fool!

And of course we have to think of Supernatural and the Leviathan and other monsters from before the creation of the world that existed in that something before it was created in a state of totally inexistent pre-creational non-existence. That discourse of Supernatural is just as irritating with Supernatural as it is with this book: how can the existence of god be asserted, though they are nothing but the life of minerals in the cosmos before real life appears, before these minerals are ever created, that is to say before life with flesh on top of the skeleton. These gods are not stated as creators. They certainly are not our human gods of our human religions. But they are gods all the same that are strictly useless since they do not create anything. They are another name for life, what’s more mineral life, and the only objective of this mineral life is to have permanent intercourse with a male human wizard. In other words that very ancient goddess wants to have her play toy or play thing in her own bed or rockbottom, and she will keep peaceful as long as she gets her cup of male milk every so often.

When I have said that I just wonder if the dedication of the book is not the real meaning of it. In other words the author is inventing a conflictual love affair with the basic geological and chemical elements that compose life as a sublimation, a compensation, a frustration and even a schizophrenic delirium to have in his pages what he will never have with his life partner, note we are strictly defined as straight in this story, though quite often we could doubt it and think it is as straight as my elbow when I am blowing my nose.

If you like extreme action, that’s you nest. Just come the way your are.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU