The paired surrealist novellas in the aptly-titled Voyages to Nowhere masterfully explore the lacunae that divide being and experience. Tom Newton’s vivid prose and striking imagery chart the brutal intersections between reality and imagination (or is it madness and sanity?) on a psychological, political and artistic level. The stories are a diptych, at once united and separated by the gap between them, with the ending of “Revolution in Dreamtime,” which is set in the aftermath of WWI, also suggesting the beginning of “Warfilm,” which is set during the second World War – echoing the way the 1920s both link and divide the two wars. The casual violence of the skirmishes fought across this cultural and political no man’s land echoes that of the trenches themselves. The book’s surrealist voice suggests the psychological analogue of this struggle, which is fought across the lacuna that is the self. That this absent self is one’s only means of negotiating the fraught boundaries of experience is in the most frightening elements in these tales – even as it provides the tentative, existential hope of the characters who persist in the voyage, even when they are aware of the futility of reaching a destination.
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