Talisman Angelical

Samantha Davies and Matthew Bower
Talisman Angelical (2017)
I'm not sure why I left it so long to track this one down, it being among the first to be published by Amphetamine Sulphate. I suppose those initial six titles appearing all at once seemed just a bit overwhelming, and a couple of the others sounded more like the sort of thing I would appreciate, and I had a hunch this one might be a bit on the incomprehensible side.

I'm not sure who Samantha Davies is. Goodreads describes her as an author of books about life as an executive escort whose job seems to be the sexy spanking of important business people. I strongly suspect we're talking about a completely different Samantha Davies, although you never know with Amphetamine Sulphate. Matthew Bower is of course the man behind Skullflower, who probably influenced more groups, artists and musicians than you've even heard of. I'm not really sure how the division of labour works here. My first instinct would be to propose Davies as an organising force to that which gushes forth from the Bower spigot, but I'm probably wrong.

Anyway, Talisman Angelical is a bit on the incomprehensible side in so much as that the HBO series is probably a long fucking way off. Yet while it reads like random signals, channelling if you like, the narrative suggests a progression - like we're learning something and we're given the details in an order which makes sense, even if what we're learning isn't easy to describe. The narrative is approximately shamanic, I suppose, but eclectic and not above the occasional pop reference where it suits the mood, and at the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, as a reading experience it's very much comparable to listening to Skullflower - like a blast of non-verbal meaning, something which can only be described in abstract terms, beyond language, something overwhelming which overloads the sense. Strangest of all is that something so uncompromising in forging its own lines of communication regardless of convention should prove so absorbing. It really pulls you in and it's difficult to say why. I've never subscribed to the idea of there being a meaning of life, but were there such a thing, I'd say you stand a good chance of finding it somewhere in here.