SOLEYN FENIX

In 1975, a professor, Eurasian Marcellanus Serrulaz, presents his graduate students with incomprehensible texts from the 1830s, written in Dutch Indoneisa, which he has discovered and sneaked home. The professor is in a panic because he cannot understand the peculiar polylingual writings of English-Balinese coarsair and poet, Alsandair I Dewa Deverell, a distinguished veteran of the British Invasion of Java, August, 1811. One of the professor’s graduate students, Desmond Javaleine, becomes obsessively interested in learning more about, as well as decoding Deverell. Javaleine takes a leave of absence at the drop of a pin, and heads for Southeast Asia. In Singapore, he gains an invaluable tip, and takes off for the jungles of Sumatra, wherein he discovers literary gold in a volume with two novellas in it, one by Deverall, which is autobiographical, and one by his companion during the invasion. Over two years Javaleine, discovers and collects a number of documents that enhance the growing portrait of the mysterious Deverell. Javaleine’s professor, Marcellanus Serrulaz, gradually grows jealous of the comet his own student has become, and his journey to Indonesia to confront Javaleine, takes a series of uncanny turns in the Rajah Ampat Islands, just off the coast of New Guinea. A thousand foot rock tower, nestled in jungle at the end of an inlet on Waigeo Island, becomes focus. A Yosemite-style rock climb, with an ambient consciousness, and higher up, a colony of sentient plants, living in cave systems and on the face, equipped with formidable appendages, lead to an internal assize, in which the professor is taken to task for offering to persecute his student, by an animated, living eidolon of Alsandair I Dewa Deverell, the man both men had originally come there to search after. SOLEYN FENIX is called a Gewrixlung, becasue it contains a mixture of manuscripts, all which illuminate the character of the elusive, vanished poet of the early 1800s. A strong and circumstantial period narrative set in 1975 and 1976 create an atmosphere of sustained dramatic interest, which is systematically expanded and enhanced by the cropping up, all through the book, of external documents pertaining to Deverell: two novels, an essay, letter, and other short writings.