Omega

Omega is a story of dark, deep, sometimes desolate but always hopeful alternatives. We run our lives alongside the “what might have been”. We run those lives with compassion. And with humour. And with the persistence of love. Omega is two stories, both very human, both addressing the harsh realities of a world of this age and this time: one recognisable, the other sinister. We are invited to sympathise with both sides.

I met Chris thirty years ago and we found we had much in common in our attitude and desires for what we wished to achieve from our writing, even though we were very different writers. We were both published at the time by Faber and Faber. His first novel was Capella’s Golden Eyes. In the early and middle 80s we enjoyed a little “time off”, co-editing a writer’s magazine (Focus)and three volumes of stories, Other Edens, which featured early work by some now well-known authors in the field.

But importantly, Chris went on to write The Insider—a, story of alien occupation in the most invasive of ways—and In Limbo. In Limbo, a story concerning “Carpenter”, a man in care after a nervous breakdown, contains some of Chris’s funniest and most personal writing in the second of its three sections. Intensely political though much of his work is, he is also a very wry observer with a great sense of humour. In Omega, for instance, Owen’s historian father is described as having a “prodigious appetite for disapproval. He had a special distaste for what he called ‘fantasists’—historians who did not stick scrupulously to the facts but were prepared to speculate on alternative outcomes.”

After In Limbo, Chris produced a collection of related short stories entitled Chimeras. Again, they are set in a world we can recognise but which is not our own world. They deal with the process of creation, of invention, of the desire to fashion beauty in a place where beauty is both ubiquitous and yet absent. They are Chris’s take on the way we live in two worlds: that y ie real and that of the imagined—the creative process, another theme that fascinates him. Art, in these tales, is conjured out of the air: “creations deliberately fashioned with an excess of ambition so that they dissolved away within minutes of their emergence, leaving nothing but dust behind.” An eloquent comment on the ephemeral nature of “art for art’s sake”? And yet, in another tale, an artist of genuine talent is described as claiming that “becoming an artist had given meaning to his life. He wanted to leave behind something lasting. When he had difficulties with a creation, he would pause… focusing his imagination.” He would become as a “locked door.”

Imagination is fleeting, but it can leave dust or reality.

Chris spent his childhood in South Wales. Hard work, respect for family, the courage to challenge authority informs his writing, the mood of his writing, the passion of his writing; and indeed, the politics of his writing. In his 1993 novel Aztec Century he takes a huge chance by setting up a Britain as it might have been if taken over by a fascist state; but he twists the tale to make the conquering forces the Aztecs, in a world where the Spanish had failed to conquer them and the Aztec kingdom has become all powerful. By so doing he doesn’t just set two political regimes into conflict and contrast, as happened in the middle 20th Century; he deals with the confrontation of belief systems and the role and respect of two hierarchical societies, the brutality of such societies, where the notion of sacrifice is played for everything that “sacrifice” means.

I read a proof of Omega whilst on vacation. It was hot. Everything around me was lazy with ease. In the villa, I read a book that was dark and compelling, and which punched holes in the society that we have become. It is a story of two worlds, two men who are the same man, two lives that are entangled across a strange barrier. Chris often argues through fiction for an understanding of the way we live in a dual reality. Omega opens many doors, and there are scenes that are shocking in their truth and in their brutality. What Omega does very precisely, and very much for the time in which it is being published, is ask the big question about how we cope with our lives, how we deal with the dark, or the bright, that is in the lives of others; how we trust. And the question is both an alpha and an omega question.

Robert Holdstock

September 2007

PROLOGUE

I woke up in the back of an ambulance. Two men in short-sleeved shirts were standing over me.

“I’m sure I’ve seen him before” one said.

The other one leaned closer. “What’s your name?”

For some reason I grinned. It probably looked cheesy.

“Owen,” I mouthed. “Owen Meredith.”

I wasn’t sure whether the words had actually come out.