Indulgences in Prelapsarian Fictioneering

John Clute has gone full-on crazy shaman and it is epic:

It is not easy—it should really no longer be feasible—to write a tale set in the twentieth century that is not a tale about the twentieth century. Like great lithe amorous birds flapping in vacuum, the two novels on review may occasionally seem to slide into the abyssal contextless natter of mimetic realism, sometimes for pages on end; but always there is a hint that these indulgences in prelapsarian fictioneering are courteous rather than supplicant, that they are expressions of nostalgia for lives spent in Eden, for characters unpacked for pages on end in an absence of the world, “round” characters in a world that is not round. There is some virtue in this, surely. As meat instantiations of Homo sapiens we do, all of us, exude some whiff of the nectar we swam in before the abattoir of birth. Or so it is fond to think.