Whip Me To The Eaast

The sun barely rises on Newland's day.... So he up sticks to pursue a beautiful Chinese actress, and to seek some ease under a heaven roiling with creation stories. Yet what Newland and his motley fellow-travellers unearth soon makes it too perilous to stay.

Whip Me to the East is happening here and now in a world which has slipped its reins. China is close to war, and the high-school students are protesting their non-involvement. While their classrooms crackle, someone smokes out Newland as the porn star Simon Berry, although his former metier is never revealed to the university where he works. We find out why after Berry returns home to Oxford and his father, a classicist turned military defence specialist, conscripts him into government service.

Berry uses wordplay to inhabit a new language and to cope with his past. Through it, he makes a chance discovery, which whips him and his ragtag band into knights-errant ready to stave off any disaster. As the wreaths of fog descend, love's eye-catching truce emerges. All cultures have their way of hope, which lovers best find blind.

Dettagli