After a while his narrative reasserts control over itself with an immense effort. In the second half of the book, Louis’s diary becomes fragmentary, composed of non-sequitur parables or obscure allusions, refusing to describe the day-to-day world around him. He too has been injected with Pallidine, and is heading for the same destination as the other prisoners. Louis’s own play, Auschwitz: A Comedy, is finally completed and staged just at the point where Louis realises what most readers will have done far earlier. Pallidine brings the subject vastly increased intelligence – which explains some of the other things Louis sees at Camp Archimedes – but it also causes physical deterioration and, ultimately, death. He had been injected with Pallidine, a drug based upon syphillis. However, one of the others collapses and dies during the performance.
Busk, are taking a close interest in what he says and does.Įventually, Louis begins work, with some of his fellow prisoners, on a staging of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Both the prison governor, Haast, and a psychologist, Dr. He’s aware, though, that his acts are being monitored. He begins to write again after a long silence, in a manic state of excitement. There he has, to his delight, a decent library, pleasant accommodation, and fellow-prisoners whom he feels he can talk to. He receives an inoculation of ‘‘what seemed like several thousand cc’s of bilgy ook,’’ and is then transferred to an unusual prison called Camp Archimedes.
It rapidly becomes clear, though, that his incarceration is not normal. Imprisoned for his opposition to his country’s wars, Louis writes a diary, which becomes the text of the book. Serialised in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds, it tells the story of Louis Sacchetti, a semi-successful poet in a near-future US. Why?Ĭamp Concentration, his most well-known novel, is surely the place to start. Yet he was pretty consistently underappreciated and mistrusted by the SF field, even when he was producing his major works in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Disch was a consummately capable writer, attentive to character and style as well as to his place in the wider world of literature. Disch, Ballard’s near-contemporary of the 1960s New Wave, there’s the opposite problem. Ballard in this space two months ago, I said that he was, by most conventional measures, not a very good writer.
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