博客來After being arrested for trespassing on his ex-girlfriend’s college campus, nineteen-year-old Shannon receives a restraining order, an inveterate attack of colic and an inexplicable phone call from the Voice whose seemingly impossible promise to reunite Shannon with his unrequited love plays on a potential-suicide’s willingness to try anything. Uncertain of the Voice’s motives, Shannon nonetheless follows its command to leave for Europe on Detroit’s next redeye. There he finds himself immersed in a religious war whose violence demands from him participation that can’t be redeemed via casuistry or self-defence and whose sanctions issue from gods old and incipient. Forced to operate in conjunction with the worst of two evils, Shannon and three fellow vassals must escort a severely disabled child to Vejer de la Frontera, Spain, if they’re to see the Voice’s promises materialize.
Written with a poetic density reminiscent of Rilke and the concinnity of Cormac McCarthy, CANT soon departs from a traditional morality tale into an inverted bildungsroman in which an escalation of alcohol and opiate intake threatens to reave the Voice’s proffered rewards of significance and Shannon’s attrited memory of love. As their mercenary travail is degraded into otiose bloodletting each must maintain, lose, transcend or be transpierced by the ensiform hope on which he has balanced for perhaps too long.
