The City of Lists
by Brigid Rose
£8.99 paperback Crocus Books (2009)
ISBN 13: 9780946745975 | ISBN 10: 0946745978.
To buy The City of Lists, click here
To read an interview with Brigid in Leftlion, click here
To read Brigid's short story 'The Speaker', click here
Reviews
Gangaji, author of A Diamond in Your Pocket
“For me the novel portrays the nightmare of bondage in such a heart rending way. The forces that work to keep our spirit under control can be found in any time, past-present-future. The call to freedom and the internal and external obstacles to that call are the same throughout time. As heart breaking as the book was for me, I was left inspired by the possibility that whatever the circumstances, we can take responsibility for discovering where freedom is. Even in the face of grave danger, we can leave the deadening security of the false promises of controlling and being controlled. We can dare to fly home.”
The City of Lists by Brigid Rose reviewed by Martin Nathanael
I found this a most
gripping book – the most unusual novel I have ever read. For one
thing, it includes the dove-tailing of time sequences, later events
preceding the events leading up to them, which at first I found
strange; however, as the story unfolded I became more relaxed about
this – it seemed to be an unspoken way of drawing out how threads
underpin our inner motives and the actions which naturally
follow.
I shuddered at the
picture of a society in which the powers to be, blinded by their
own narrow consciousness, ruthlessly sought to prevent any citizen
from awakening to their own greater
nature.
I
would like to let the author, Brigid Rose, speak for herself about
how this, her first novel, which won a prize, came to be
written:
“In
writing the novel I was greatly inspired by the teachings of
Eckhart Tolle, and also by other teachers of non-duality such as
Gangaji. I was particularly struck by a sentence in Eckhart Tolle’s
The Power of Now. The sentence begins, 'As the egoic mode of
consciousness and all the social, political and economic structures
it created, enter their final stage of collapse...' This made me
think about the future and imagine what it would be like if a
‘consciousness revolution’ actually occurred on a wide scale in
society. I imagined the powers-that-be trying to retain control of
people who were becoming transformed by spiritual teachings like
Eckhart’s and by teachers' transmissions of stillness. I imagined
that those in authority might try to clamp down on those practices
that quietened the ego; banning teachings, retreats, gatherings etc
to prevent society's old, out-dated structures from
collapsing
But then I also imagined that perhaps no government could really
prevent such a peaceful inner revolution from taking place and so
in the story a very frightened person - the shy, contemplative
Valentine - stumbles unexpectedly one day into an ego-less state.
This is the first sign that the revolution cannot be stopped
despite the clamp-down. Through Valentine’s intense fear and
suffering, and also through his ‘ripeness’ for liberation, his
sense of self falls away; just what the authorities are trying to
prevent. Although some quite terrible things have happened to
Valentine by the end of the story, I wanted to show that no matter
what is occurring on the external level, he still experiences and
is engulfed by an overwhelming sense of peace.
The Eased in the novel is a play on the East. The word has become
distorted and changed over the hundred or so years that have
intervened between now and the book’s narrative - a bit like
Chinese whispers. Through ignorance of preceding history due to the
imposed censorship by the authorities, the word has become
distorted from East to Eased. The ‘teachings from the Eased’ that
the novel refers to are the eastern philosophical and spiritual
ideas that have come to the West especially since the 1960s.”
Brigid’s novel challenges us to consider the possibility that inner
freedom can be realised even in the midst of the most appalling
social straitjacket which is itself a symptom of the fear of
freedom itself.