They say that in the beginning and in the end there is only Darkness.
And that, at some completely random point in time, a naked man who cannot speak appears on White City’s First Street, with nothing on him, save three images on his mind:
The image of a girl; the image of a machine; and the image of a wet, crescent, moon.
Then, there is a girl, in another White City, so far and yet so close to its sister city.
The girl is doing her PhD thesis in sociology, yet she soon finds herself entangled in the craziest of stories; a story fuelled by bizarre, surreal and disturbing events, by her quirky dreams and by her interactions with the heir to her homeland’s most powerful and notorious family.
And this is just the beginning of Part One of a story as unusual and mysterious as it is addictive.
A story about the eternal clash of the cosmic forces of Order versus Chaos; but most of all a story about the tragically comical, and comically tragic, figure standing in the middle of the Arena where Order and Chaos meet each other with such relentless ferocity:
The Human Being.
They say that in the beginning and in the end there is only Darkness.
And that, at some completely random point in time, a naked man who cannot speak appears on White City’s First Street, with nothing on him, save three images on his mind:
The image of a girl; the image of a machine; and the image of a wet, crescent, moon.
Then, there is a girl, in another White City, so far and yet so close to its sister city.
The girl is doing her PhD thesis in sociology, yet she soon finds herself entangled in the craziest of stories; a story fuelled by bizarre, surreal and disturbing events, by her quirky dreams and by her interactions with the heir to her homeland’s most powerful and notorious family.
And this is just the beginning of Part One of a story as unusual and mysterious as it is addictive.
A story about the eternal clash of the cosmic forces of Order versus Chaos; but most of all a story about the tragically comical, and comically tragic, figure standing in the middle of the Arena where Order and Chaos meet each other with such relentless ferocity:
The Human Being.
My eyes open up very gradually, as I slowly get accustomed to the light.
Fortunately, the latter is not too overwhelming,
It feels as if it is very early or very late in the day, but I cannot yet be sure as to which of the two the case is.
I inspect my surroundings.
A narrow street opens up in front of me.
I know that this is First Street, but I don’t know what this means.
Low whitewashed houses stand on both of its sides.
A number of cars, neither very old nor very new, are parked here and there.
There appears to be no sign of any activity whatsoever; both space and time feel frozen.
I begin to walk.
I walk straight ahead, refusing to turn my head left, right or backwards.
As I walk, I can feel the vague fragments of a little thought moving around inside my head, fighting to unite themselves into a coherent whole.
I realise that these are actually not the fragments of a thought, but rather of a memory.
I stop in the middle of the road, with my eyes half-closed, waiting for this shattered memory to emerge as a whole in my consciousness.
Alas, this never happens; instead, three images, for which it is unclear whether they are related with one another or not, pop up in the proverbial screen of my mind.
Image 1: The face of a smiling girl, as I see it from sideways and below, which is mostly darkened by the setting sun, that is right behind her as I am looking at her; critically, therefore, distorting the clarity of my field of vision and, thus, obstructing my capability to discern her facial characteristics.
Image 2: A strange contraption, which is located in a big storage room that gives the strong impression of being somewhere underground, with a lot of lights blinking on its surface; most prominently two big rectangular ones close to the top – a red one on its left hand side and a black one on its right hand side – resembling two eyes; and a big, white-coloured, circular one, right in the middle, resembling a mouth.
Image 3: A wet, Cheshire, moon (i.e. a crescent moon of which the “horns” point up at an angle, away from the horizon, so that the moon takes the shape of a bowl or a smile) that I am looking at, on a perfectly still and quiet night, down from the big veranda of a dark apartment situated on one of the highest floors of a tall building overlooking what looks like a major road artery close to the centre of a big city.
I mentally record the three images, before proceeding further down the road, only to be intercepted by a big, fluffy, white cat that seems to have materialised out of nowhere, just a handful of steps ahead of me.
Dreamy and Surrealistic. That is how I'd describe this book in two words to anyone asking. White City by Alex Exarchos is a psychological thriller that transports the reader into a world of a wild cacophony of terrifying nightmares blending together with lust and sin driving your every action. It's a place where you're either a part of the Power, or you belong to the People.
Alex Exarchos's writing is raw and powerful. Although I was completely immersed in his writing, a trigger warning would be mention of rape, many times. Also, maybe I'm just nitpicking but as a student of both language and literature, it bothers me to see a few grammatical errors and misplacement of punctuations here and there. Apart from that, I loved the twists and turns and the perfect revelation moments. The characters were all really fascinating as well.
Mary Strong is a student pursuing a Ph.D. in sociology, who earned my attention instantly in the first few pages, is surprised to find out that her lecturer, Dr. Stein, went missing on the same day as her grandma fifty years ago. When she learns that her friend Lydia's visions carry startling parallels to those of her own, she is further puzzled. This triggers her to set out on a mission to solve the mystery of the recurring disturbing dreams.
She then cautiously told me that in her dreams the rapist wasn’t talking at all, with
one single exception: the fisting in the end of the nightmare, when he repeatedly
whispered to her ear my name: “Mary”.
This, somehow and irrespective of the fact that my name is one of the most common ones, at least in the western world, answered my “why” question; as to the “how”, Lydia told me she instinctively knew - meaning: she could not logically justify it - that I would probably receive a message in some dream, a message that would be of critical importance in identifying and finding her rapist.
Oh boy, this was a wild, wild ride! At its heart, this book is a little gem, although I emphasize it's rough around the edges (and in need of a polishing). I highly recommend it to fans of neo-noir mysteries as well as readers who flock to tales of breakdowns in society, surviving in post-apocalyptic dystopias, and other, ahem... light reading!