Strangers and Refugees

John Fraser’s latest work of fiction follows the refugee Khalil in two related stories, ‘The Refugees’ and ‘Travels with Strangers’. We are all refugees seeking an entry to soCaucasmewhere when we’ve left somewhere else. Our knowledge is a raft that’s carried us on lumpy seas. We can forget all that when we arrive. It doesn’t serve. We don’t, of course, stop being refugees, not ever, but we have a lot of living to do while we’re forgetting where we were before. It’s a commonplace, to say we’re strangers to ourselves – not only when we are alone, but especially when we are in company. Khalil comes from a ruined land, chooses the obvious role in his new places – acting. On film, where someone else will edit him. He longs to find the treasure we all want – and isn’t his, or ours. He flits through ‘Travels with Strangers’ too – but people of all spots and stripes are rolling down, shaken from their safe spots – and finish in the Caucasus! A place that once was Eden – and they try to plant and harvest there again. It doesn’t necessarily work. It’s strange, because they’re of all human types. Maybe the world wasn’t made for people, or maybe it’s too far gone for them to find a space to think and talk. And how they talk! Seek love and sex and something – nothing – in between. There must be, of course, conclusion. Khalil’s a fine dancer – exhibition standard. That’s a gift!’One of the most extraordinary publishing events of the past few years has been the rapid, indeed insistent, appearance of the novels of John Fraser. There are few parallels in literary history to this almost simultaneous and largely belated appearance of a mature oeuvre, sprung like Athena from Zeus’s forehead; and the novels in themselves are extraordinary. I can think of nothing much like them in fiction. Fraser maintains a masterfully ironic distance from the extreme conditions in which his characters find themselves. There are strikingly beautiful descriptions, veiled allusions to rooted traditions, unlikely events half-glimpsed, abrupted narratives, surreal but somehow apposite social customs. Fraser’s work is conceived on a heroic scale in terms both of its ideas and its situational metaphors. If he were to be filmed, it would need the combined talents of a Bunuel, a Gilliam, a Cameron. Like Thomas Pynchon, whom in some ways he resembles, Fraser is a deep and serious fantasist, wildly inventive. The reader rides as on a switchback or luge of impetuous attention, with effects flashing by at virtuoso speeds. The characters seem to be unwitting agents of chaos, however much wise reflection the author bestows upon them. They move with shrugging self-assurance through circumstances as richly-detailed and as without reliable compass-points as a Chinese scroll.'((John Fuller, poet, novelist, Booker Prize nominee, Whitbread Award winner)