Category: Fantasy Publisher: Wing ePress
ISBN-10: 1613096291
Type: Fiction
Pages: 217
Copyright: Dec 1, 2018
ISBN-13: 9781613096291
It’s only rock ’n’ roll but…
Jeremy Crawford has had enough of his life as a megawealthy banker, and is prepared to give up all its privileges for the sake of freedom. Why? Because he’s suddenly realized he has never made any choices of his own and only ever been chosen. But this is about to change. With a little help from his friends he finds a way to resolve both his own issues and those of a political world gone crazy.
Excerpt
Within moments of Jeremy’s head hitting the palliasse and Pete snuggling down next to him, his life so far began flashing before his mind’s eye. And, with his new epiphanic perspective, he didn’t like the look of it. Not one bit he didn’t. The insistent question he kept asking himself as he writhed and sweated was: “What have I ever chosen?”
So down the list he went, starting with birth. Well, he hadn’t chosen that, had he? What human or any other animal ever did? How could they, pre-embryonically? Mind you, parents Gloria and Ron hadn’t exactly planned Jeremy’s coming into the world either by all accounts, notably those of his Auntie Maureen.
“Proper surprised they were when you came along,” she’d once confided to Jeremy in a pub called The Hope and Horse after five Xmas gin and tonics too many. “At their age. Dearie me. Our Gloria must’ve forgotten her pills or sunnink. Probably reckoned she didn’t need ‘em any more. But then out you popped.”
So, birth not planned, more a question of accident. A fumbled quickie, then the random workings of sperm and ova, and bingo a baby! Him. Fair enough, Jeremy could live with that.
But then on the list went: school, Oxford, the bank, Sophie. Had he ever chosen any of them? Of course he hadn’t, quite the reverse. It was he who had been picked by them because he was either so bloody clever at maths (school, Oxford, bank) or, later when fabulously wealthy, Sophie.
“And where was free will in any of this?” he mumbled, clutching at his head and whacking at the palliasse. “Nowhere, that was WHERE,” he yelled, which upset Pete who rolled onto his other side and grunted, “oink.” What was wrong with this human?
But, being a pig Pete had no answer to that. Didn’t have the big brain to fathom such angst. Just found it irritating. Life for Pete was lived from one moment to the next without worrying about anything except where his next meal was coming from. As far as he was concerned concepts like life and death, let alone who chose whom or why, had no meaning. Pete didn’t even know that were he to venture unwarily out of his barn he could be captured, killed, and turned into sausages, bacon, chops, or, in the worst case scenario, pork scratchings. Lucky Pete.
Meanwhile Jeremy continued to whack at his palliasse as into his troubled mind oozed a yet more vexed question, namely: “If—as I now suspect—I were chosen by school, Oxford, the bank and Sophie, was I also chosen by my best friend Mister Money and what he could buy? Using me as his puppet and jerking my strings. Not me who chose the mansion, therefore, but the mansion that chose me. Not me who chose the Merc but the Merc that selected me saying it was the best car on the market for a person like me to be seen driving. Ditto for the power clothes from top tailors, and even the Bankerese I spoke…or was I spoken by it just as I had been by the Oxford drawl I adopted when the public school brigade mocked my ‘funny prole sayings’”?
And the answer to this was: “Yes to all of the above.”
But it was the language issue that really stuck in his gullet. Spoken by? Never speaking? Parroting the words of others without ever examining the embedded agendas those words concealed? Jeremy also now “spoke” smatterings of tongues other than English—bits of French, German, Italian and Spanish, all at restaurant level—and whenever he did it was like acting. The different body language, the different grammatical structures, the different nuances, until…he became a different person, which was fun but unreal. No wonder some actors no longer knew who they were and went crazy. So maybe he’d been chosen yet again, this time by the very instrument that supposedly separated him from the animals. And how was a person expected to think if he couldn’t trust the very words supposed to carry meaning, if the only purpose of those words were some form of phatic psycho-babble? Find a whole new language? Well, maybe.
“Holy SHIT,” said Jeremy, slapping at his head.
From his side of the palliasse, Pete said, “Oink, oink, OINK,” which roughly translates as: “Shut the fuck up, will you? I’m trying to get a little shuteye here.”
Jeremy calmed, nodded over at Pete, and smiled his first smile in a long time.
“Okay, pal. Point taken,” he said. “Just trying to get the madness out of my mind, that’s all.”
“Oink,” said Pete, who took to snoring.
~*~
No sleep for Jeremy though because the madness issue continued to torment him. What actually was madness, he asked himself. Clearly everybody he knew would conclude from his current behaviour he was the one who was mad because they were continuing to play the games required of them for social acceptance. So they would obviously consider themselves “normal” and him “mad.” Jeremy saw that and didn’t blame them for it. But that still didn’t answer his central question.
Dimly, from an Oxford symposium he’d attended all those years ago, he recalled the words of a shrink called Laing. R.D. Laing, maybe? What was it he’d been quoted as saying again? That insanity was a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world, something like that. Jeremy also remembered the work of a Frenchie called Foucault discussed at the same event. How it was that civilisation constructed ideas of madness—or “unreason”—for its own devious purposes but this said nothing about the condition itself. Indeed was fundamentally misleading. And had not the ex-Beatle Paul McCartney once been heard to remark, “I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird.”
“Mmm, not just me then,” Jeremy mused as Pete continued to snore contentedly.
Then there was a novel the audience been advised to read, by a writer called Ken Kesey who’d been conned by his publishers and never made a dime from his work about a falsely diagnosed “mad” guy who gets lobotomized for causing trouble and telling the truth about the mental institution he’s been incarcerated in. What was it called again? One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s something. Nest? That was it. A fiction, but nonetheless a persuasive one when he considered the ways “madness” was used as a convenient excuse to ridicule or lock away opponents of political systems that brooked no dissent, vide the ways of the ex-Soviet Union or the current psychopath in the Kremlin. Or indeed the psycho in the White House whose routine response to criticism was to brush it off as “fake” and/or “insane” and fire its exponents.
“Sooo,” Jeremy asked himself. “Is it really me that’s mad, or is it the world?”
To address this question he opted to narrow the focus to only recent history and take a cold look at the facts—if there were still “facts” in a post-truth society where lies were told with a “fuck you and your mother if you don’t believe me” impunity. In which a mega-rich narcissist could get himself elected American president by lying through his teeth abetted by his psychopath pal in the Kremlin and the corrupt social media. In which British electors had been conned into voting to leave the European Union through a campaign targeted to arouse xenophobic delusions of their specious grandeur. In which parliamentary democracies built across centuries were now under threat from meddling personal data banks like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. What sane person could contemplate such a scenario and think it anything but insane? Not Jeremy that was for sure, so maybe it was Laing’s version of insanity he needed rationally to adjust to. And what better way to face up to this dystopian chaos than to confront it? How he had no idea, but at least it was in his mind as a possibility.
“Better late than never,” he muttered, covering his head with a smelly blanket and snuggling down on his palliasse. “Nightie, nightie, Pete.”
“Oink,” said Pete in mid-snore.
“Mmm, who knows?” Jeremy mumbled. “Meanwhile it’s sleep for me too, perchance to have a happier dream this time. That would be a turn up for the book.”
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Reviews for "Chosen"
Reviewed by victoria maposa
12/6/2018
I enjoyed reading Chosen by Paddy Bostock right from the first page. The author writes cleverly. I especially love his style of writing. It’s witty and funny at the same time. Also, he builds his characters gradually and you get to “live with the characters and experience life with them” because of that.
The book tells the story of Jeremy Crawford, a very successful man who has everything he wants but is suddenly not happy. He’s not happy that he didn’t choose his life. He then goes soul-searching and develops a strong bond with his Pet Pig Pete. From that moment on, he takes charge of his life and things change drastically.
Every good book must have a little romance and this book doesn’t disappoint. As you read the book, you get to meet Julie and fall in love with her instantly. This is definite must-read and I highly recommend it!
Paddy, you sure are prolific. It's taking me a year now to complete a novel. Too many distractions like watching Trump. Speaking of Trump, I noticed you managed to bring current events into this novel. It certainly looks to be interesting. And, you mentioned a memory of mine. Every day when I went to Engineering Corner from the parking lot past the library at Stanford to study boring engineering, I walked right past Ken Kesey's Morris Minor appropriately psychedelically painted. Probably donated, if sold, might have fetched him a pretty penny.
Christmas When Music Almost Killed the World is a novel in which nothing is quite what it seems and everything is loaded with shadowy dreams of the past and nightmares set to soul-pounding music of the future.
Swamp Alley is a portal between this side and the other side. The Wizard is destined to save the land from the Ugly Babies in the Land of Lack Luster on the other side. With the help of Madame Plume and her magic wand, can they save the magical doll
