Fragments from the Leper Colony is a novel of consciousness told through 131 interlocking fragments.
Its unnamed narrator inhabits the Colony: a world of unemployment, meaningless labour, rented rooms, political meetings, television schedules, computer courses, cultural debris and relationships that repeatedly fail to provide connection. The Colony is not merely a location. It is a condition entered when time loses its shape, meaningful work disappears and the future contracts into the management of another day.
Everything is filtered through one unstable and unusually associative mind. No external narrator corrects his conclusions. No alternative account explains how others perceive him. He is insightful and distorted, compassionate and cruel, intellectually hungry and emotionally repetitive. He condemns the world, condemns himself, constructs plans, abandons them and begins again.
Bodhidharma, Dostoevsky, Homer and Philip K. Dick coexist with reality television, shampoo advertisements, programming languages, factory work and romantic obsession. A shopping list may interrupt a metaphysical insight. A musical discovery may become a temporary reason to live. The ordinary is continually transformed into symbolic architecture.
The narrator seeks reconstruction through books, music, computing, employment, exercise, sobriety and the formation of The Harridans. Above all, he places immense hope upon Archetypal Woman, imagining that her love might provide beauty, value, domestic security and escape. Yet each attempted system of renewal is vulnerable to collapse.
As the fragments accumulate, a hidden narrative becomes visible: despair produces a plan; discipline produces hope; hope becomes disproportionate expectation; disappointment returns the narrator to disgust, intoxication or inertia. The repetition is not incidental. It is the plot of the consciousness.
Around him, people become masks and grotesques: the Fellow Traveller, the Fiend, the Psychology Mentor, Mr Melancholy on Display, the Muso Idiot and Maudlin Death Boy. Private suffering begins to turn into theatrical language, and the Colony gradually becomes a carnival of deformity in which the narrator is both observer and exhibit.
Claustrophobic, abrasive, tragic and darkly comic, Fragments from the Leper Colony explores alienation, mediated identity, precarious work, romantic projection and the struggle to establish a value system within a culture experienced as spiritually exhausted.
The narrator may not escape the Colony, but he refuses to surrender his curiosity. He continues to read, listen, interpret, create and ask what things are and what they mean.
The Colony deforms everything that enters it.
His consciousness makes it speak.