“The moonlight hums around them, bodies give way to ectoplasmic
spirit-forces, Inside oozes delicately-featured Out, the thousand-petalled lotus blooms on their foreheads, cross-legged on the bed factory-time stops, time becomes TIME, even when Magda puts the lights on again and there’s this enormous spider on the window screen. She touches its underside with her fingernail and it disappears away, under the Hood of Moon.”

An intellectual confrontation with aging ontology meets with the insulating veneer of superficiality and consumerism. Deep enlightenment is somehow woven into fixations with the superficial and trashy, a protective skin graft to keep their eking existence intact. As escapists from escapism they are poured into a mould of black lycra and worship their outer sheen, coercing a second youth out of old conventionalised bodies. Their jungle paradise is full of beautiful colours and textures but most often expressed by its extremes of climate or its coterie of invasive snakes and spiders. The women experience a ‘coming out’ only to have to re-shut themselves in, cocooning within their middle aged paranoia, making silk purses while they plan face lifts and belly tucks. Their story is an experiential foray into a ménage-à-trois – three women opting out of the conventions of life and love to create their own sensual world on the fringes of the Brazilian jungle, a life which suspends desire, imagination and passion through a silky black dreamland of heightened reality.

The Dream of the Black Topaze Chamber shows the late Hugh Fox at his most sublime. With so many eminently quotable aphorisms and moments of bard-like inspiration he is able to explore the subtle underpinnings of relationships, the minute unspoken thought-flashes between friends, and the mute electricity of shared moments. He moves from the intimate to the universal seamlessly, where inert trivialities can explode into a political treatise or a sublime poetic reflection within a single breath. The Black Topaze Chamber becomes the hub of isolated souls finding some last spiritual union through the open eroticism of their bodies. What results is a lyrical novel of ecstatic sexual and sensual metamorphosis rendered through a poetic alchemy of Brazilian gemstones.

ISBN: 978-1-908011-39-8
Copyright: Hugh Fox
Language: English
Pages: 112  
Binding: perfect-bound paperback
Interior print: black & white
Dimensions: 15.2cm wide × 22.9cm tall (6 x 9 in)

Published November 18th 2011

£8.99

$14.99