Chris reviewed The troika by Stepan Chapman
How It Is
4 stars
Stepan Chapman’s The Troika is a very strange story. It concerns three characters, who seem to be in some way related, and who are travelling through a Beckettian endless desert in the bodies of three entities: a Mexican woman, a Jeep, and a Brontosaurus. The story is deeply surrealistic and obeys the twisted logic of dreams. Characters have names like Mazer (the creator of mazes) and Bosch (the artist of the Garden of Earthly Delights). During the story we are introduced to the back-histories of the three principal characters and their lives in what seems to be an early-21st-century America, a cryogenic storage facility in the northern wastes, and a Mexico reverted to New Age worship of the pre-Columbian gods, before their personalities were uploaded into a space probe. The probe’s result was to send them insane and the events that happen to them afterwards - the desert, and what …
Stepan Chapman’s The Troika is a very strange story. It concerns three characters, who seem to be in some way related, and who are travelling through a Beckettian endless desert in the bodies of three entities: a Mexican woman, a Jeep, and a Brontosaurus. The story is deeply surrealistic and obeys the twisted logic of dreams. Characters have names like Mazer (the creator of mazes) and Bosch (the artist of the Garden of Earthly Delights). During the story we are introduced to the back-histories of the three principal characters and their lives in what seems to be an early-21st-century America, a cryogenic storage facility in the northern wastes, and a Mexico reverted to New Age worship of the pre-Columbian gods, before their personalities were uploaded into a space probe. The probe’s result was to send them insane and the events that happen to them afterwards - the desert, and what follows - is an experiment in psychotherapy, though obsessed with their treatment the psychotherapist becomes more and more fixated on them and developing new hoops for them to jump through before he will release their spirits from the music box he keeps on his desk. It is also (thankfully, after all this heavy dislocational stuff) a very funny book, with the strange juxtapositions of nightmare providing the jokes. Even in the bits that appear to be set in ‘our world’ it is by no means certain that the dreamer has woken up, and if he/she has, into what reality?
