Well, this was quite the book! I'm not sure I can tell you what happens or indeed who's in it, as it's unclear what's real within the confines of the story, what's fiction and what's simply imagined. It's further blurred by a host of experimental storytelling techniques. It could easily be impenetrable, but the descriptive prose is immersive, even if it's into a world we don't necessarily want to be in. It kept my attention and it's not going to be an easy book to forget. Indeed, life feels emptier for the book being over. Closing the final page was like saying goodbye to a very weird friend, one we love dearly but can only take in small doses. The experience is often overwhelming.

Whether this book is for you may depend on how you read that paragraph. I'm not entirely sure if I'm complimenting 'The Inner Harbour' or insulting it, so make your mind up about that and you'll know whether you need this book in this life or a long way away from you.

There is some background I should throw out, though I'm not sure how helpful it will be. Antoine Volodine is a pseudonym, for Jean Desvignes, an author who's somehow both French and Russian. He's written a lot of books under a few pseudonyms, all in French, and a growing number of them are seeing publication in English translation, like this one from 1996, 'Le Port intérieur'. It's what he calls a post-exotic novel, meaning that it's part of a forty-nine book cycle, which I presume has now been completed, of works set in a shared universe.

From what I gather from interviews and reviews, it's set in a post-apocalyptic world populated by what Matthew Eatough describes in his review of 'Mevlido's Dreams', also translated by Gina M. Stamm for University of Minnesota Press as "an eccentric cast of shamans, assassins, subhumans, anthropomorphized animals, immortal dreamwalkers, and failed revolutionaries". As this takes place in Portuguese Macau, shortly before its return to China in 1999, it's hardly futuristic, so I'm assuming that this is an alternate post-apocalyptic world.

There are very few characters and I'm not remotely sure how many of them are real. The one I'm surest about is Breughel, who used to be some sort of revolutionary, operating within a political cell of three people, working against the Party or Paradise, presumably a temporarily successful socialist state that falls into a freshly corrupt capitalism. Maybe reading other post-exotic books would provide background—I would hope so—but I haven't done that, so I'm thrown into this one blind. Regardless, Breughel is languishing in decay in the Inner Harbour area of Macau, preparing for the inevitable visit of a killer who he names Kotter.

Kotter duly arrives and interrogates Breughel in his hovel, to discover the location of the others from his cell, a woman Breughel loves by the name of Gloria Vancouver and a Brazilian, who may or may not have been in a relationship with either or both of them, called Machado. Both appear here but potentially not in person. Gloria is the most likely of the other characters to be real and alive and present, if she is, she's likely to be living in a mental institution because she's unable to survive in the real world any more. Machado only appears in what could memories, stories or just distractions. Whatever they are, we have no way of knowing whether Breughel is simply making them up.

After all, it's very possible that Breughel is insane himself, lost inside his own head, mourning the loss of his love and soon his life. There are plenty of points when we're told that Gloria's dead and perhaps Machado too, or just gone. I don't believe all of them are thrown at Kotter as deflection, an inevitably vain attempt to prevent him from discovering that she's still alive and not far away. The only character treated consistently throughout the entire book is Breughel's neighbour, Mrs. Fong, who mostly ignores him and listens to Chinese operas.

If you're wondering how dense I must be to not know who's real and who isn't, especially with such a tiny cast of characters, let me talk you through how the book is constructed.

It's divided not into chapters but dialogues, fiction, logbooks, dreams and monologues. Most are centered on and perhaps told by Breughel, who, after his revolutionary exploits and possibly time spent in an actual war, became a novelist. You might think that the sections labeled Fiction trawl in his writings and, hey, you might be right, but they continue stories that start in dialogues and move into logbooks. We know that Breughel invented the name of Kotter. It's very possible, even likely, that he also invented the person, as his writings bleed into his reality.

There are certainly points where the monologues unfold in stream of consciousness style, single sentences literally taking up multiple pages.

Some trawl in conversation, bouncing back and forth between Breughel and Kotter with dialogue included and oddly capitalised mid-sentence so that, for instance, a monologue could begin with me as Kotter but he asks Breughel a question and he says, Sure, here's what I'll give as an answer, and I'll respond to that and, after six pages of this, I've almost lost track of whether I'm Kotter or Breughel and he neglects to confirm or deny with, You're probably losing it right now, and you, my reader, can see just how problematic this sort of thing can be to read merely in one paragraph, let alone for six whole pages.

Like I said, this can be overwhelming. I like to use run-on sentences but this might even cause me nightmares. I keep tight leashes on mine. Did I mention that there are other sentences that end before they should? Some of them presumably represent lost trains of thought but others seem a lot less easy to explain away. "Ah, said Kotter. That's how you." is one example. "You listen to the rumble of the trucks that." is another. Oh, and there are shifts from the third person to the first, without gaps, just from one paragraph to the next.

I wondered if some of this was Breughel lost in memory, but he may be writing not remembering. Then again, he might be schizophrenic or mad or so buried in intigue that he can't find his way out again. Revolutionaries sometimes adopt multiple personae, just to survive. Certainly, we see him in this book with fake papers. Maybe he's Kotter himself and dementia has blurred the lines so he can't tell which persona is the real one any more. Ultimately, this plays like a bizarre romance, an adoring or perhaps obsessed lover still caring for her even after she's gone mad, but it could well be just a character study of madness.

What I got out of this book, beyond the definition of "chevaux de frise", a term that's thrown out four times at least without explanation—it's an obstacle, initially intended to block cavalry—is a drive to describe. As a series, this would seem to be speculative fiction but, as a short novel, it's a lot more like general fiction. Volodine describes everything around Breughel, not just in terms of what it looks like, but what it sounds like, tastes like, smells like. It often feels like this works best as a travelogue, but is it of the Inner Harbour of Macau or the inner harbour of Breughel's mind?

By the way, these sensory explorations aren't always pleasant and, in fact, are far more likely not to be. It seems to me that some of these sections were written just so Volodine could describe the crush of a crowd during a moment of change or the food at a cheap roadside café or an elephant shot by a guardpost dying while a long line of people file past it to get to wherever. You wouldn't necessarily want to experience these in person, but they can be fascinating to experience within the pages of a book.

Maybe that's the post-exotic part of this. Exotic tends to mean distant and unknown but exotica is a sanitised version of that, its essence distilled into something vaguely recognised and palatable. Post-exotic may mean the opposite of exotica, something we know taken elsewhere and morphed into being exotic at gunpoint, with plenty of kicks to the ribs. Maybe I should read more of these post-exotic novels, gradually being translated and published in English by university presses, not just Minnesota but Rochester and Nebraska, and other non-profits mandated to promote cross-cultural exchange.

So, did any of that make sense? ~~ Hal C F Astell