SPACEBOOKTHENOVEL

Review of “SPACEBOOKTHENOVEL”

Robert Allan Richardson

Originally an Ebook but now in print on Amazon

$14.95

 

Pagescape Press 2013

 

A thought provoking book but the question is what thoughts are provoked.  The problem with dealing with the PhD Professoriate is that each thinks he/she is the repository of all that is great and good in the world and this book is a regurgitation of the author’s concept of that collection.

 

Benjamin Bidwell, a consumate talker as a child, loses his voice early in life to his consternation.  He was fifteen and had been entered into a speech contest, at which he was odds on favorite to win given his penchant for oratory.  But alas and lackaday just as he starts into providing those golden thoughts he becomes mum.  As Benjamin puts it “So ended my prodigies of speech.”

 

He was not content within his silence and as he worked hard and well at various farms all those words kept piling up inside him. Straining to be free.  And then, mirabile dictu, he found a way to release himself from this enforced silence: he saw and answered an ad for an auctioneer school.  Indeed he regained his power of speech and we are henceforth treated to his every thought, profound to whimsical.  Except for Professor Richardson’s use of punctuation the phrase “stream of consciousness” becomes one of those provoked thoughts we spoke of at the outset.  In any case Bidwell decides he will learn everything necessary to provide him the wherewithal to judge all that is right and wrong with the world. 

 

On this journey of exploration Benjamin provides us both an outside view of life and an inside view.  The outside consists of his starting to work as a farmhand milking cows while he attends University as a free spirit simply auditing those classes in which he was interested.  No need to pay, after all he is going to do the world a good turn by learning all this.  He does an auction for a friend and this leads eventually to his starting his own business and turn leads to buying a farm, and eventually into a bookbinding business. There is a side trip into singing operatic duets. The book ends with pages of apparent witticisms and common phrases turned about. 

 

The inside view, during these discourses examine our present day technology and Bidwell’s extreme dislike for it as it apparently takes us outside of ourselves.  I grant that all technology throws shadows but Richardson dwells in those shadows and predicts disaster.  As a pacifist he seeks to prove his courage and his manhood.  I hold no brief against that. I have nonesuch as friends but I am aware of much good they do when they choose to support their country. But methinks the Professor doth protesteth too much.

 

Why is it the intellectuals conceit that the only life is the life on a farm, being a horny-handed son of the soil.  As Reginald Heber( English clergyman, traveler, man of letters and hymn-writer) would have it "...every prospect pleases and only man is vile”. The present population of the United States is approximately 300 million I believe.  Can you imagine if all 300,000,000 of us lived and worked on a farm?

 

 I would call Professor Richardson a neo-Luddite except for the irony of his writing this novel originally in cyberspace.  And perhaps his magnum opus suffered in translating from modern technology to use of the Gutenberg approach.