When All the Days Have Gone by Lars Boye Jerlach
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Never-ending Recurrence

A Danish gravedigger, from Hamlet perhaps; a sailor, apparently from the disastrous Franklin expedition to the far North of Canada in 1848; a girlish apparition, who provides some continuity between the two; and several opinionated cats and birds - Jerlach has once again assembled an enigmatic cast in a sort of metempsychotic fantasy.

Time is stretched, distorted, and turned inside out. Maelstroms and terrestial sinkholes act like astronomical black holes to permit time travel. Characters therefore have a sort of eternal Platonic existence. They are their (our?) collective past, bound up in little packages of anonymous thought and feeling that are passed mysteriously from generation to generation. Thus we necessarily become our forebears in a way that is more than genetic. The days never do end until thought and feeling cease entirely. Do I detect a Jungian tendency?

My first thoughts were that the book needed a better English editor. The vocabulary is frequently archaic or arcane, and some usages less than idiomatic. But eventually it became clear that these were part of the 19th century flavour that was intended. Coleridge plays a big part, as does Poe, Scandinavian myth, and perhaps even Mark Twain, Charles Dodgson and Thomas Aquinas (as Brother Thommen OP!). The names Ambrosius and Veronica point to Augustine but perhaps that’s only in my head. As the story settles into my unconscious, I’m quite sure many more literary allusions will become clearer.

Jerlach is discursive, allusive, erudite, and great fun. Reading him is like being inside Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, unexpected connections across various dimensions pop up continuously. A literary sleigh-ride.

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