The Ascent of Isaac Steward

by Mike French

Overview

Literary surrealism at its most profound, The Ascent of Isaac Steward follows one man's journey into his own mind as he struggles to come to terms with the trauma that has reshaped his life. A year on from the car crash in which his wife Rebekah and son Esau were killed and his other son Jacob left in a coma, Isaac Steward has suppressed every memory of that fateful day. Yet fate seems determined to make him remember, driving Isaac deeper and deeper into himself. Slowly, dysfunction builds on delusion, as childhood memories compete with a persona he has fabricated to regress to an earlier, happier time. Violence, death and destruction result as Isaac gradually loses his grip on reality. His half-brother Ishmael tells him that he must return to the wood at his childhood home, to a tree he called The Dandelion Tree, if he is ever to be reunited with Rebekah. But as he descends further, he starts to question his own existence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781908168351
Publisher:	Elsewhen Press
Publication date:	04/19/2013
Series:	Once Upon a Life , #1
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	926 KB

About the Author

Mike French is the owner and senior editor of the prestigious literary magazine, The View From Here which has been called many fine things since it started in 2007 including "Attractive, informative, sparkling and useful" by Iain M. Banks and for having a "great passion and drive" by Booker shortlisted Tom McCarthy. Mike's debut novel, The Ascent of Isaac Steward, the first book of the Dandelion Trilogy, was published in 2011 and nominated for a Galaxy National Book Award which, presumably due to an unfortunate clerical error, was awarded to Dawn French. The second book in the trilogy, the satirical Blue Friday, was published in 2012 by Elsewhen Press who are publishing this new edition of the first. The third book, Convergence, is expected later this year. Born in Cornwall in 1967, Mike spent his childhood flipping between England and Scotland with a few years in between in Singapore. Splitting his time between his own writing, editing the magazine, running author workshops and working with atp media in Luton, Mike is married with three children and a growing number of pets. He currently lives in Luton in the UK and when not working watches Formula 1, eats Ben & Jerry's Phish Food and listens to Noah and the Whale.

Editorial Reviews

After a car crash leaves the protagonist, Isaac, bereft of his wife, Rebekah, and sons Jacob and Esau, French's debut confronts a classic problem: how to render an unreliable narrator and his "ark nightmares of the mind" in ways that: clearly delineate shifts between lucidity and delusion without condescending to the reader; capture the effects (from repetitions and fixations to sensory distortions) with believability rather than indulgence; and avoid cliché. French, unfortunately, does not provide Isaac with a strong counterpoint, preventing readers from empathizing. The best works on mental illness, after all, often include a baseline of normalcy from which to gauge the extent of what has been lost. Instead, he immediately immerses his readers in a disorienting, hallucinatory world, revealing Isaac's mind as a site for convoluted scenes populated with figures partly based on those he had known in real life, occasional Biblical allusions, as well as flashbacks, discursions, and a hodgepodge ranging from "temporal prostitutes" to a recurring memory of Punch and Judy. The resulting exercise in selective memory, while ambitious, never quite coheres, and this eccentric tale of madness may be best suited to fans of experimental forms. (June)

Publishers Weekly