Trajan Arch eBook Michael Williams Dave Mattingly Jason S Walters
Download As PDF : Trajan Arch eBook Michael Williams Dave Mattingly Jason S Walters 
Trajan's Arch is a fantasy realism novel by Walden Books best seller Michael Williams. Gabriel Rackett stands at the threshold of middle age. He lives north of Chicago and teaches at a small community college. He has written one novel and has no prospects of writing another; his powers stagnated by drink and loss. Then into his possession comes a manuscript written by a childhood friend...
Trajan Arch eBook Michael Williams Dave Mattingly Jason S Walters
This beautifully crafted, haunting tale is not a fantasy in the ordinary sense. It could perhaps fit into the genre of magical realism, in ways similar to works by Gabriel García Márquez. And indeed the realism of places and people is gripping and detailed, while the fantastic elements are for the most part subtle.Michael Williams' writing is consistently witty and insightful throughout the book. Through a series of masterful transitions in voice and perspective, the author gradually unfolds the tale of Gabriel Rackett and the influence of one Trajan Bell on his life. The beginning reads slightly like a coming of age novel, but as Gabriel never quite seems to attain a final goal and we are drawn deeper into the spiral of his life, the story takes on new depth. This unique, sometimes melancholy story is told in such a way as to make it new, yet achingly familiar in places, like something we have never yet "let rise into words". It is a book to savor, well worth the time to read no matter your usual genre of preference.
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Trajan Arch eBook Michael Williams Dave Mattingly Jason S Walters Reviews
Michael Williams took a 13 year hiatus between his last book and this one, and the result is a fully formed work, with layers upon layers of meaning. I have now read it twice (a task quite easy to do, given how propelled the narrative is even within the opening pages), and I imagine that I will discover as many new things upon my third perusal. It is the story of Gabriel Rackett, a man who reads and writes fantasy, comes of age and finds his adulthood to be at a stark difference from the books he has read. But its not just a book about a boy becoming man, if it were it would lack the remarkable depths of the soul that Mr. Williams manages to probe.
It is instead a story about stories. Trajan, of the title, is an enigmatic neighbor who has a great influence on Gabriel, and we are granted access to his three stories and one fragment. We see as they inform Gabe's life, as Tolkien and others leave their traces, and the thing that occurs to us is the weight and meaning that stories are able to have to us. We see that it provides a way of interpreting the world (a sometimes insufficient way, but what else do we have?).
Seriously read this book, and dissolve into the various narratives as all of us readers, especially of fantasy, are wont to do. This is easily the best fantasy-tinged novel I had read in far too long, and has a wealth of treasures to bestow upon its readers. Pick it up, you won't be disappointed.
The brief plot synopsis does not do this novel justice. On the surface, Trajan's Arch is about an author struggling with his past. It is told in a series of letters, fiction, and even clinical studies! One might think the narrative is hard to follow, but it's really not. It is seemless, giving the story a dream-like quality. Williams does an oustanding job of capturing both the external and internal frustrations of Gabriel as he tries to create a masterpiece. One of the strong points of the tale is that it takes on a mythic quality; the characters have a kind of shared, eternal experience that plays out in their lives as well as their fiction. Sometimes events blend together so seemlessly that the fantasy and reality seem one and the same. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the creative process, especially those who have been published or DREAM of being published. Also, those interested in a good read that will make you think long after you have finished the book should check out Trajan's Arch. TWO THUMBS UP!
Trajan's Arch is one of those rare contemporary works that deliver a "literary" experience while still offering a large portion of unpretentious fun. It's not a traditional ghost story, but it is a story of haunting. The central character, Gabriel Rackett, confronts memories of growing up in 1960/70s Louisville, and some of Gabriel's recollections involve apparitions-heralds of innocence destroyed by maturity, death, or intolerance-that defy rational explanation. For reasons Gabriel never fully understands, his mind returns again and again to Trajan Bell, an unusual man who lived next door. Although I knew I was journeying through a magic-tinted version of the bildungsroman, I honestly didn't know where Williams was taking me until I got there. At the end, I felt very happy with where I'd arrived.
At one point, Trajan leads young Gabriel into the woods, where they spot a magnificent owl Trajan dubs "queen of the ghosts." As Gabriel tries to describe her, Trajan stops him "Not yet, Gabriel. Don't let her rise into words just yet... Do not even name her parts, or call her what you think she is." This resistance to words, especially notable because Trajan writes fiction and Gabriel soon will, becomes an important theme, suggesting that language, no matter how powerful, is still inadequate to encompass experience. Faced with such a theme, and feeling in my gut that a writer can approach truth but never really get there, I hesitate to reduce the experience of the novel to words on a page. But like Gabriel, I'm trying.
The novel has a deceptively encyclopedic scope. Since its narrative includes Trajan's and Gabriel's fictions, Gabriel's letters to his ex-wife and son, a psychological case history, and other elements that add formal variety, it is able to reach far beyond a single lifetime. Fans of historical fantasy will find some of Western history's most fascinating eras the Elizabethan Age, fin-de-siecle London, the American Civil War, and even shades of the Ancient Rome that provides Trajan and the novel a name. Fantasy enthusiasts might also share Gabriel's devotion to Tolkein, whose world-building tales have more than a little in common with the more recognizably "real" world that Williams constructs.
In Trajan's Arch, coming of age depends on a relationship with history and literature, a relationship developed through Gabriel's interactions with Trajan. Trajan's Arch, like Trajan himself, is a symbolic gateway into a larger adult world of events and letters, and it figures the mix of opportunity and danger inherent to any mentoring relationship. I call the novel's scope "deceptively" encyclopedic because for all its reach, it remains very intimate. It's candid about the emotional and sexual confusion of growing up, and it shows how connections between adults and children can compound as well as alleviate the pressures of forming a personal identity. At times, Trajan stands in for Gabriel's absent father, and as Gabriel struggles not to be absent from the life of his own son Dominic, the novel conveys difficult insights about fathers, sons, and masculinity.
Trajan, Gabriel, and Dominic are sensitive and vulnerable, and as they involve one another in a shared world of imagination, the results are both damaging and enlightening. They ask many questions and can't always deal with the few answers they get. Some readers might not be happy with the book's lack of answers-or the answers' hesitation to rise into words-but the ambiguities of the characters' lives and of the novel itself are, for me, Trajan's Arch`s most satisfying accomplishment.
This beautifully crafted, haunting tale is not a fantasy in the ordinary sense. It could perhaps fit into the genre of magical realism, in ways similar to works by Gabriel García Márquez. And indeed the realism of places and people is gripping and detailed, while the fantastic elements are for the most part subtle.
Michael Williams' writing is consistently witty and insightful throughout the book. Through a series of masterful transitions in voice and perspective, the author gradually unfolds the tale of Gabriel Rackett and the influence of one Trajan Bell on his life. The beginning reads slightly like a coming of age novel, but as Gabriel never quite seems to attain a final goal and we are drawn deeper into the spiral of his life, the story takes on new depth. This unique, sometimes melancholy story is told in such a way as to make it new, yet achingly familiar in places, like something we have never yet "let rise into words". It is a book to savor, well worth the time to read no matter your usual genre of preference.
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