One of the great joys of reviewing is happening upon a small press book from a first author that is so good, you can’t stop thinking about it. It’s a wonderful serendipity that publishers, agents and reviewers wearily hope for and rarely find. The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore is one of those books. It’s tightly, expertly written, and yet so tenderly rendered, that the reader descends directly into Thomas Passmore’s dreams, struggling to surface back to reality along with the protagonist.
At first glance the story seems simple enough. A man wakes from a strange dream as he lands in Heathrow from Sydney, slightly disoriented. There’s nothing too odd in Thomas Passmore’s initial disorientation. Anyone who has taken a long flight will recognise that muzzy jetlagged sense of confusion, and if it isn’t the first time, the déjà vu. Thomas understands convention, and speaks and navigates his way through the airport clearly. His mission on this visit is to spend time with his dying mother, and to find an old girlfriend and discover why she suddenly left him a number of years ago. It doesn’t sound like much of a plot, and the connection between Kate and his mother seems a tenuous one, but the resulting journey progresses in a spiral through Thomas’ past where he has to confront a number of interwoven demons. It’s a psychological trip that, for the reader, is both confronting and intimately, almost horribly, familiar. It’s more than just a trip down memory lane for Thomas, it’s a fight for life, underpinned by a mystery that is both concrete and metaphoric.
The novel is ambitious in that it attempts the journey from a very deep starting point: Thomas’ unconscious psyche. The writing is richly poetic, at times so charged that you could publish it as stanzas and it would work:
As seasons pass, I coil tighter. Spend months pulling the world in on myself. Become my own black hole, sucking the bright energy out of my most colourful dreams, spitting out nothing. (190)
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