Hunt and Peck
Originally printed as Web of Lies (Hardiner suggests that this was an editorial change, and his editor at the time was Maxence Lawrence), this novel is presented as an exchange between anonymous users on a school's internal messaging system—something like a primitive AIM, which, for younger readers, was what we did before we could snapchat. USER 3 has been positively identified as Johnny Kite, though USERs 1 and 2 consistently misrepresent themselves, claiming different names and characteristics as USER 3 chisels away at their stories. In the background of what looks like typical high school angst and gossip, the beginnings of the Center Lake conspiracy are unfolding "down by the water behind the school". (Center Lake is not referred to by name until the black book.) This is our first introduction to Rhodes Rush characters Good Golly Molly and Plink Shivers, and many other details of setting and situation from Lights Low and Halides are referenced but not named or addressed outright.
The book's general sense is one of creeping conspiracy. Behind the green bars of text, sex and murder vie and claw, and something sinister and unnatural creaks in the distant circuits connecting USER 3 to the liars (or liar) on the other end. The story is told only through the exchanges of the USERs and the few status lines Hardiner chucks in (USER 1 is now online, USER 1 is now offline). There is a suggestion that this, the shortest of the Rosewire novels, happens more or less in real time: USER 3 does not sign off until the end of the book, and there are no jarring discontinuities in terms of the events related. (Little David had a field day with this format: my most successful attempt at appropriating it can be found in the collection Upstart Crow in the store.)
We start to see a few hairline fractures in the relationship between Johnny Kite and his Friend (we learn for certain that USER 3 is Johnny Kite in Halides, so we read USER 3's "fella" as Johnny Kite's Friend), particularly towards the end of the book when USER 3 begins to realize just how little he knows about who's on the other end of the computer. His misgivings about his Friend lead him to believe both users on the other end are one and the same person—someone close to him, who has seen him "vulnerable" (read: naked), who would use tender gifts to manipulate and torture to no apparent end. It's important to note that Johnny Kite's habit of identifying what he fears in himself and then externalizing those features into those around him starts this early in the series. It's hamartia revealed in slo-mo, and nothing's more exciting than to watch a fall go on forever. Just ask Vince Gilligan.
Lights Low
Following the script-like quality of Hunt and Peck, Lights Low is far more what you'd consider to be a novel. As a point of fact, Zachary Osgood typically refers to Lights Low as "the first novel of the Rosewire system", as opposed to Hunt and Peck which he calls "the first entry". He's got a point. Here we are in 3rd-person omniscient (and HOW), throwing down the shutters and revealing Rhodes Rush High School behind those black screens.
It's a deep roar of a book, grinding with a sort of eternal despair even as it confronts some pretty silly issues: for instance, in a smaller subplot, we learn that Timber Wilkins can't stand up in English class without something else standing up with him—something that at first glance belongs in that Spelling Bee musical more than a Rosewire book. But of course, Timber's classmates and teacher learn about his uncontrolled talents, find themselves fascinated and amused by it, and very soon a classroom joke becomes something horrifying, casually abusive, and everyone is profoundly changed by their role in it. When we meet Timber again in the black book, the handsome, confident, funny, brilliant quarterback has become a weedy shallow boring libertine, diseased and traumatized and addicted to more vices than it's comfortable to even consider. You can feel it coming after his Final Presentation, too, and the litany of profane things that Hardiner hints at happening behind the closed doors of Room 404. No one in that classroom comes through unscathed.
Of course, this is one smaller thread in a larger story about Johnny Kite confronting the Board: he is set up to climb the student body government in return for his obedience to a strange panel of men and women who meet Saturday nights at 11pm in the school building. We learn much more about this Board, its superiors, and the plan it is putting in motion over the course of the series—excuse me again, system—but it's here, in this book, that we realize there is a larger Board that seems to not only span great stretches of space, but also time. It is not just the ruling body of the Rhodes Rush district: their scope is far greater than this school system and its students, though it's not until the black book we ever get any good idea of what they've been plotting. Johnny Kite maneuvers his way into their inner circle and apparently [spoilers redacted], but we know the Board has not disbanded even as early as Halides.
Of course, given the structure of the book (it's laced from top to bottom with illusory sequences, little essays and vignettes and even full chapters laying out alternate versions of events to what later books prove to be true), it's very difficult to say which details that are unverified or unrefuted by future volumes are trustworthy. That means that most of Johnny Kite's actions, as well as most of the scenes including his Friend and the Board, are practically hearsay—there is an unreliable narrator at work, only that narrator is omniscient and lacks apparent bias in its dissimulation.
Ugh.
You know that something horrible happened in Room 404 because of the events with Timber and all of his [spoilers redacted] in the black book and because of certain fleeting catches of thought in Rise; you know Trueblood the native starts his curse at the lake because of Halides and the black book and everything that happens after—but did Burnzlandt the Oilman jump out the window of the Boardroom? Did Suellen Swaylon whisper a prayer at the start of every class because she thought it was the only thing giving her good grades? Did Johnny Kite ever carve—Well. We'll get to that. There is a lot that bears out. There is a lot that doesn't. Max Larry didn't binge drink with Assistant Principal Poighen and skinny dip in "the water behind the school"—Max Larry has an alcohol sensitivity and has never had but one sip of anything boozy in his life.
Still... There's just so much we can't know... Nothing said about it later. Only appearing here. No ramifications stretching forward. Could be true. Could be false. After a while, it becomes easier to just believe everything. Even the things that contradict the other things. Even the things later books prove are wrong. Just choose to believe everything. That's what Johnny Kite does. And it takes him down to the water behind the school that later we learn is Center Lake.
As Johnny Kite creeps up out of the student world, out of the faculty world, and into a sort of magical reality approaching Twin Peaks (a subject for another day is comparing and contrasting the mythologies of the two series...), his relationship with his Friend deteriorates in profound, often horrifying ways. The most-discussed episode in the book, perhaps the most-discussed episode of Harry Hardiner's entire oeuvre, is the violent sexual encounter between the two the night after the election.
Profanity abounds, explicit descriptions of questionable activities interchange with suggestive but unquestionably horrifying passages of dream-like verse, and it climaxes with Johnny Kite carving something into the small of his Friend's back. You can imagine that after this two-page ordeal, libraries across the country weren't exactly clamoring to get their hands on Hardiner books. There are some Hardiner scholars who even suggest that was the desired result: Harry Hardiner didn't want his books in ready circulation. It would fit in neatly with Rex Patch's interpretation that Hardiner never felt he was writing at the right time—he laced in this unfortunate moment in order to keep the Rosewire conversation tabled for another day. Of course, other rodonymatologists will say that this scene was ripped right from the lives of Harry Hardiner and Maxence Lawrence (minus, we assume, the "signing"). One way or another, it stands out... and sets the stage for the abrupt and disconcerting ending of the next book.
Halides
Rex Patch says that Harry Hardiner himself referred to the first three books in the Rosewire system as "the Rhodes Rush trilogy"—although not in any recorded interviews. I tend to believe Dr Patch in all things, and I don't believe anyone would benefit from fabricating such a detail, so I accept and wholeheartedly support the idea that Halides wraps up the first "chapter" of the system and prepares us for all the horror and wonder that is yet to explode outwards from Center Lake.
In a lot of ways, the first three books, Hunt and Peck, Lights Low, and Halides, have a strong structural parallel to books 7-9, the black book, Conquest of Algiers, and Rise. If both Hunt and Peck and the black book set up new characters, a conspiracy, a set of power struggles, love themes, the seeds of revenge, and deep-rooted suspicions—and Lights Low and Conquest of Algiers both head from conceptual structure to more "straightforward" narrative, building on the stories and characters of the books which immediately precede them in new or broader settings—then both Halides and Rise might be considered the absolute unravelling, both in form and content, of their lead-ups. Both Halides and Rise are heavily stream-of-consciousness (though that's a little like comparing Ulysses to Finnegan's Wake), both center around the collapse of social structure and relationships and plans and preestablished narratives, and both end with wholly unsatisfying and rather leading unfinished sentences. At least Halides doesn't end mid-word... like Rise might.
Although the third Rosewire book has been pretty positively ascribed to the Friend's point of view, and his point of view alone, a little debate has persisted over the years—perhaps what we're getting are Johnny Kite's imagined version of his Friend's running internal narrative, or perhaps there is plenty to recommend a reading in which the stream-of-consciousness does not belong to any one character, but bounces back and forth between the minds of individuals and groups as they encounter the tail-ends of stories summoned up in Lights Low. But certainly, the Friend is a constant, and as always unnamed, presence—if it's not his thoughts, it involves his thoughts. This is his book. Not that we don't see a lot of our Rhodes Rush cast...
Plink Shivers's blackmail plot finally turns in on itself, and the assistant principal "skins him alive" (uh, literally or metaphorically, I must confess, I cannot say). Good Golly Molly escapes her abusive relationship and runs from Rhodes Rush into the woods behind the school, never to be seen again—until the black book. Trueblood the Native finishes enacting his curse, Donneta Dumas and her twin brother Diblet manage to switch places after all, and the last stragglers of the Rhodes Rush Board flee to Center Lake to regroup. We learn exactly how the events of Hunt and Peck fold into the more straightforward narrative of Lights Low, we get a better feeling for how many of the story threads in Lights Low were imagined and how many were "real", and keen-eyed viewers can pick out suggestions of characters and settings to come, including a discussion of "the Maghreb" in the Friend's geography class and a flitting image of a "bright green tome" which must be Green Stone Story.
The less said about Halides the better: in a lot of ways, it's its own conclusion, and it certainly feels as though it closes an entire storyline without going out of its way to set up a next step forward. I'll admit that when I first read it, I didn't quite know how books 4, 5, and 6 could possibly connect Halides with the masterful black book—and, as we'll discuss a little bit in a moment, those intervening entries in Rosewire system are less concerned with filling in the gaps of the lives of these now-familiar characters and much more concerned with filling out the ideas and stakes that animate them. Explosionism in a nutshell. At the end of Halides you feel like the circle's closed, even if you already realize that there are deeper circles spiralling inwards yet to come.
Needless to say, the Friend makes his last, uh, major appearance in this book, although his presence continues to be felt as strongly (or more strongly) than most other recurring characters all the way through the end of Rise. We also find in Halides the last fluidly connected entry in Rosewire: think about The Chronicles of Narnia for a moment, and how The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe moves directly towards Prince Caspian and thence to Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, The Last Battle. And then you have A Boy and his Horse. In many ways, we're about to get into Boy and his Horse territory and linger there longer than C.S. Lewis would have found tenable. It's lovely, tangential, but integral—so let's hop in without further
Green Stone Story
This book. Ya'll, this book. It's my favorite. Rex Patch can have Conquest of Algiers. Zachary Osgood can keep Rise all to himself. Maxence Lawrence once wrote in one of his more vindictive moments that the only Rosewire book worth reading was Lights Low—well, I must politely but thoroughly disagree. Green Stone Story is where it's at, and what it's all about.
...Literally.
Okay—so there are some classical Chinese novels that incorporate a little opening trill of establishing information, and a close-tied conclusion of very few chapters right at the end, but in between? There are dozens of chapters of adventures, battles, clever maneuvering, love stories, philosophy, exploration of strange lands and alien psyches, demons and deities and fancifully high stakes... You could practically flip back and forth between them and read them out of sequence, like the episodes of The Simpsons, only with dragons and destiny and war andmischievous immortal monkeys. Read Journey to the West, or Water Margin, or even Dream of the Red Chamber and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and you will know exactly what I mean. Or... Pick up Green Stone Story.
Hardiner appropriates the form and tone of these great Chinese classics and applies the sprawling concept to a land called Candlewood (and its "capital", Candletree), its people, and the subtly devastating force that is our sort-of protagonist Stavra Starvos. Most simply put, Stavra begins the novel in the "wholecloth" first seven chapters as a wanderer, "washed out in a streambed" after some cataclysm we're never given any details on—and her first action is to see a "shockgreen stone" beside her as she wakes, pick it up, and pocket it. She apparently belonged somewhere else, but has been transported here to Candlewood, where she meets many of the woodland figures before making her way into Candletree. In Candletree, she meets Nuthatch (who of course runs the Nuthatchery), Wojhid Wijohid, the Kindly Chopper, and dozens of other townspeople who want nothing more than to recover this lost soul.
Adventure ensues.
And, needless to say for a Hardiner book, everything goes straight to hell.
Despite all her charming attributes, Stavra seems addicted to destruction and chaos, drawn towards flames and gouts of rain and violent people, sowing discord casually and without apparent reflection or reason. She reminds me a bit of Hedda Gabler, both in her characterization and in the clear suggestion that SOMETHING rational has made her this way... even if we never explicitly told what.
The first seven chapters are Stavra wandering in the woods. The last seven chapters are Stavra wandering in the woods. The 93 chapters in between are Stavra and the townspeople in all manner of mishaps and hijinks, running the gamut from the absurdly hilarious (like "Nuthatch Does Inventory" or "The Bumblegum Contest") to the abjectly terrifying ("The Other Choppers", "Green Stone Song", "Colubra Culubre Says It's So", "Last Night Party", "Treasure Pond")—these chapters may serve the overarching story ("Stavra and Sturna", "Nuthatch's Claim", "Chop Me Kindly") and others seem to be there only to expand the world and make it more colorful, more real, and more mysteriously unwhole ("Legend of the Green Star", "Candlebark", "Pinner's Lament", "Tarpon Loves You More Now", "Green Wheat", "Glass Branches", "Single Finger Lake", "Garden of Dried Things", "Poonkin Wants Blood", "Service Trail", and so, so many more). It's the whole of Explosionism in a single book. And, even cooler, it's the whole of Rosewire in a single book.
I have to get a big head here and say that I noticed the pattern before I read about it in The Rosewire Companion, but it's actually pretty obvious once you see it and I probably shouldn't be all too proud of recognizing it in the first place. That's the whole point of the book, after all. A stranger is brought into a collective, dissolves it from the inside for unknown reasons, the collective lashes back out with some long-churning plan, and eventually there's a conflagration that only the stranger walks away from... straight into a new story, possibly with a new collective and a new plan to burn...
Not only does Stavra's story mimic Johnny Kite's: Stavra's arc Green Stone Story, or at least congruent arcs, appear over and over and over again. Then you learn that Green Stone Story is apparently a classic novel in the world of Rosewire, as it's the favorite book of the Senator's Daughter in Election Day, and its characters (and their preternatural powers) sit right in the middle of the Board's Center Lake plot. Again I have to say that any attempt at describing Green Stone Story further would diminish its power—please do yourself a favor, and if you only read one Rosewire book, or only one piece written by Harry Hardiner (first of all, crazy decision, but to each his own)... choose Green Stone Story. You may not thank me, but maybe, like me, you'll find yourself picking it up again and again, finding new connections, new motivations for the whole round characters, new angles in the lush Candlewood environment, so often that it seems like the book never—actually—ends. It jumps out of nowhere coming right after three books situated in Rhodes Rush and its high school... but damn if it's not a pleasure to pick your way through, and holy shit, what beautiful language. #teamsturna!
Election Day
Okay, well, after Green Stone Story, readers might expect Hardiner to keep hopping around both in form and content, and, you know what, those readers would be right. Election Day is a sequence of ten plays (or "a long-form play", as its subtitle proclaims) about a single day (an election day, go figure) and a huge list of people who are put in dire straits that day across a vast amount of space and on a variety of scales.
Over the course of all ten plays, which, to be honest, are far more successful on the page than on the stage (I dare you, directors, to mount the 9th play, "Neuron's Ballot", for a paying audience: I DARE you), we are exposed to a huge array of political theories, played out on an interpersonal scale as well as an international one. It's especially timely now as I'm writing this: Donald Trump could stand to read a couple of the monologues put in the mouth of The Vocal Minority, and Hillary Clinton might find many of the dire straits threaded by the Senator very familiar—sorry to date this document so egregiously, but I'd be remiss if I didn't at least quietly suggest that Election Day be required reading before anyone hits the booths in November.
In an effort to avoid spoilers, from here on out, these descriptions are by necessity going to become shorter and more elliptical. It's for your own good, I promise: there is nothing I can say about these last five books that will do anything but diminish their own power. They speak for themselves in very major ways. I understand, yes, that they may be hard to come by, but I would do you a disservice if I tried to synopsize them—the stories cease to be the point, and the experience of reading these books takes primacy over even the intricate ideas presented within them. If you can't find these books and you're the kind of person who desperately needs a plot summary, head by Wikipedia or pick up a copy of The Rosewire Companion: these last few especially would take several pdf pages to sum up properly, so let better minds distill down what Hardiner wrote. I'll just continue to pontificate.
Jettison Jemison
Rex Patch calls this "a graphic novel without graphics", and I get it: its layout, its arrangement of details, its characters, its stakes—they are all intensely visual and spectacular, summoning to mind noir-soaked halftone illustrations of its "superheroes without superpowers" and their race to save the new President Jemison from the ghastly team of Hunters. Really, for me, it feels like someone turned the illustrations from any Alan Moore work into text.
A lot of readers discount this sixth entry altogether, and I get why they're tempted to do so. None of these characters appear in any of the previous books (although there is a brief computer interlude with a "USER 3" that may be Johnny Kite), and none ever appear again until Rise (which isn't saying much, since every single name ever mentioned in the Rosewire system comes into play in some way or another in that last massive missive). There seems to be a general dearth of depth and focus, as we range back and forth across a divided America, following a loose team of people who are treated like the X-Men but who have no discernible "powers" and their struggle with Hunters 1-13.
It is shorter than most of the other novels (only Hunt and Peck comes up shorter by about 10,000 words, and that was mostly dialogue of sorts), and even President Jemison is never mentioned as a candidate in Election Day, which immediately preceded it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but... Jettison Jemison is fluff. Pulp. And that's A-OK with me, because it's pulp, Rosewire style.
A lot of people will suggest you skip this book if you're in a hurry. I don't necessarily think I can recommend that, but again, I understand the impulse to say that, particularly to people who may have expressed some frustration with Green Stone Story and Election Day and an interest to return directly to Johnny Kite and his quest to lead/destroy the Board. I'll say when you do read it, keep in mind that it's serving much the same purpose that Halides did for Hunt and Peck and Rise does for the black book: it ties ideas up rather than storylines and characters, and gets us ready to step back into a much wider "real" world with much higher stakes in the final section of the system.
Also, I'll admit that I actually developed my first literary crush on Miles, the charming leader of the Dependents. It's probably important to note that Miles's "power" is that "everyone likes him". Nope: it's a magic trick, I don't know how Hardiner managed that one. But somehow, even just reading the descriptions of that character and how he presents himself to the people around him makes me just quiver inside. I think even now I might be in love with Miles, which, admittedly, does make me a little bitter. Harry Hardiner created my perfect man, and, barring our own Center Lake conspiracy, I'll never, ever, ever get to know him... or get to go to town on him. To this day, every other man I meet in real life comes up short. Thanks, Harry. Way to ruin my love life at the ripe old age of 16...
the black book
Okay, so this book returns us to Johnny Kite, returns us to Rhodes Rush and to Center Lake and the Board plot, blah blah blah. Let's talk about the cover.
It was the cover that first pulled me to it, I will TOTALLY admit it. The black book was my first Harry Hardiner book. It was sitting in the top floor of a rented beach house, a little widow's walk of a floor really, only accessible by a ship's ladder, and all around windows and books. The black book had a broad screamingly black spine sticking out between an orange plastic and a yellowed cloth-bound book. There was no writing on the spine. Jet tar blackhole black. It sucked in the light around it. My eyes went straight to it. And I scoured the first couple of pages for a title.
All I saw on the title page was,
Harry Hardiner
So of course for a while I thought that was the name of the book I'd picked up and couldn't put down. A mysteriously unconnected name I kept trying to make connections to as I floated through the overlapping stories of 7 people. It never occurred to me as I read that I was seven books deep into a series. Absolutely, there are a lot of blanks filled in by the first six books. But there are a lot of blanks that aren't.
It became clear reading it that there was something going on, something one person alone couldn't fully describe. It just seemed natural that if one person alone couldn't fully describe the events at Center Lake, then seven people together isn't really all that different—of course they'll still leave gaps. And of course in a story about a man named Johnny Kite and his unnamed friend, the name Harry Hardiner is important enough to title a book after but not nearly important enough to explain. There are still times when I think of the Friend as "Harry" because of 12-year-old David. It's hard to shake that kind of excited misconception off, even when you put down the black book and pick up the hot pink one a little ways back in the line and realize that's the author block and THERE IS NO TITLE.
I've written before about my first Hardiner experience and I'm sure I will somewhere again, but the black book will always hold a very special place close to my heart that only Green Stone Story can edge out... barely. The characters mean a lot to me (anyone who appears in the Rhodes Rush sequence but not the black book always seems ancillary to me, and a little quaint), the story seems the most immediate and vibrant, the stakes seem the highest, and every single feels infallible.
The untitled black book, with its blank cover (later editions added seven charcoal-grey rectangles to the spine to indicate its placement in the series, and probably its seven protagonists as well), does bring us back around to Center Lake—and it's only here that we learn the Board's insidious plans to invite [spoilers redacted] to end the world, through the eyes of our seven narrators:
Johnny Kite has evidently become one of their most trusted commanders. Good Golly Molly, who's been practicing medicine, identifies a "disease of the word" that is spreading like wildfire in her community. Max Larry has come under Johnny Kite's protection, as the two seem to deal drugs (or are they drugs?) to set the stage for the invitation. The curse that Trueblood the native spins in the last two Rhodes Rush books is in full play as the man himself tries to "shut down the lake". [spoilers redacted] finds a way to Center Lake that isn't strictly, geographically, physically possible. Dear wounded, victimized Sturna crawls out of the pages of Green Stone Story along with [spoilers redacted] when [spoilers redacted] and does her best to stop [spoilers redacted]. And the last two narrators I can't even bring up without exposing a literary device that is really better left experienced on your own.
It's a beautiful adventure novel—every section tells an individual story, not in sequence, but overlapping and interweaving, as the Board tears out its intended page and drops it in the open lake. The unravelling that begins at the end of this novel (and Conquest of Algiers, AND Rise) is a culmination in style as well as content: once [spoilers redacted] steps out of Center Lake to burn the world, we feel the end is near. (Well, nearly a millionwords later...)
By the end of each section, we have come to the shores of Center Lake—and at the very tail end of the novel, we begin to see exactly how much dismantling of this world is possible, and it's existentially and textually horrifying. If the black book is Hunt and Peck for the last third of the system, as Harry Hardiner suggested, then the crazy amount of story detail is just the tip of the iceberg—what is happening behind the lines is far, far more important, if slightly less spectacular and personal. And that's exactly the impression we get when...
Conquest of Algiers
We are suddenly in North Africa. Or the Middle East. Or Hollywood? You know what—it doesn't matter. The Maghreb of Conquest of Algiers is an amalgamation of Western interpretations of a lot of arid, "exotic" locales. If anyone ever tried to make a movie out of the book, they could NEVER film "on location"—everything, the desert, the casbahs, the pyramids and temple complexes, the oases: EVERYTHING would have to be on a soundstage. The Maghreb in this book feels like the landscape of The Man Who Knew Too Much, or Casablanca... Or Ishtar. And boy, is that intentional.
You see, we only understand this Maghreb (whose landmarks and set pieces are a mishmash of everything from Morocco to Afghanistan) through the eyes of exchange students Barnady and St.-Pierre: this interesting and funny little dyad gives us a love story, a spy yarn, a travelogue, a series of archaeological revelations, and very nearly as much adventure as the whole of Green Stone Story... all crammed into its first half. Once they uncover the stelae-sarcophagi at Uix, however, and that's no spoiler because one of the chapters is titled, "In Which Barnady and St.-Pierre Uncover the Stelae-Sarcophagi at Uix"—after they've sifted the sand off of these powerful artifacts, a race begins, going counterclockwise around the rim of the Mediterranean, sprinting against a powerful and unnamed enemy (could it be Hunter 9 from Jettison Jemison, brought through [spoilers redacted] by the will of the Board?) as they rush "towards the end of the world" together.
Again, without giving too much away, the final chapter in Conquest of Algiers serves as sortof the eighth section of the black book: we see the events that bring Barnady and St.-Pierre to Center Lake (and perhaps most significantly how they overlap with Good Golly Molly and Trueblood's stories) in a very long chapter oh-so-cleverly titled, "The Eighth Part".
Conquest of Algiers is Rex Patch's favorite novel in the Rosewire system—and, even though I'll always place Green Stone Story and the black book ahead of it... it's not that hard to see why. Conquest has the muscular adventure of Green Stone Story, the intrigue of the Rhodes Rush books, and a brightness and humor that sets it apart from very nearly everything else Hardiner ever wrote. It's a sunny book. An oddly sunny book, to be sure, considering the subject matter and where it falls in the sequence of Rosewire works, but sunny nonetheless, and warm. Love is weighed against lust and is found to be the greater force. Violence is tested against pacifism, and pacifism seems to come out on top. Its tone is lovely. It's a welcome change, to be sure, after a long, long slog through despair and devastation. No, of course it doesn't exactly "end well", but, well, that's because of what happened at Center Lake, not because of Barnady or St.-Pierre.
Rex Patch once said, "You get the distinct impression that Conquest is an apology of sorts, and a consolation prize for those of us who truly believe in the good of this world. That sense of apology is especially strong once you look back on the eighth book from any dismal vantage point in Rise."
There are some people who will tell you to stop reading Rosewire now, before it drives you insane. Well, those people are boring. So let's go on and hit the last book Hardiner published before his disappearance in 1999.
Rise
Oh, Rise. Ohhhh Rise. It's... something.
Harry Hardiner once called the contents of this book "foamy prose". Nope, I don't know. It played into a metaphor he was making in an interview with Rex Patch (published as The Shattered Goblet): you are building a "goblet" in some strange and new fashion. The sides go up so far that maybe they eventually meet and you have created a bubble. Well, hopefully you've got enough space or some different means to fill that goblet. But once you've filled it... if you keep trying... you can only end up with an overflow or, if your goblet is closed, a shattering.
And that's the best explanation you're going to get about this book.
What happens in the half-a-million words of Rise?
Exactly.
There are very few, uh, cursive moments in Rise. Points of view, timelines, trains of thought, events, narrators, language—they can all shift mid-sentence. Mid-WORD. There is good reason the book has been compared to Finnegan's Wake. But, to be fair, it had a reason, it followed a schematic (even if it's been lost: Rex Patch got to look over it on the day he had his last interview with Hardiner, but the document seems to have up and vanished with the author), and it represented exactly what happens when [spoilers redacted] is finally summoned out of the depths of Center Lake. "Story" isn't important anymore: the narrative of the universe has been scrambled. The desires and intentions and characteristics and individual "icons": they're still floating in space (or, you know, unspace), bouncing off one another, bobbling around like molecules in a shaken soda.
Hardiner said in the Shattered Goblet interview that the prose—"foamy prose", I should restate, just to drive that image home—was NOT random, and that every shift and bounce and bobble is a reaction to what's around it.
Rex Patch says that Rise "performs the integral function on the Rosewire system." When I asked Dr Patch to explain that comment a little more, he politely refused, with the most impossible smile on his face. Dr Patch, thank you for all of your help, but damn, throw a brother a bone. Stephen King in his Entertainment Weekly review, on the other hand, said in reaction that Rise "in fact performs a full frontal lobotomy". I don't know that I can disagree with either of them.
I will full-throatedly admit that Rise frustrates the hell out of me. I can tell that there is enormous movement and intention and that there is a struggle to regain some semblance of order (I mean, that's probably the clearest conflict presented in the book: the war between design and chaos)... I can identify certain characters based on their characterizations (and diction) from earlier books (especially the narratives of the black book: particular turns of phrase rise out of the foam to help identify that, say, it's Good Golly Molly now and Trueblood here and Stavra Starvos saying that); I can pick out settings from descriptions and reactions that were familiar from the earlier books... I cannot say, though, with any certainty, what "happens", or what the ending of the book (several pages of seemingly random letters!!! WHAT!?) could POSSIBLY mean.
Which is one of the many, many, many, many, MANY reasons I want to find Harry Hardiner and just throttle him.
The implication is, at some point in the tenth and final book of the system (he'd been saying since Hunt and Peck this was a decalogue), everything from Rise would be explained. Of course, we didn't get Hardiner's tenth book (or did we? More on that in a second...) and so we readers are left at the end of what we have of Rosewire waiting to find out if the genie can be put back in the bottle, so to speak. Or, rather, back in the goblet.
Ugh.
Okay. Well. Uh. I don't know how much else I can write about Rise without stealing wholesale from others, or looking like a moron, or both.
I can say, however, that the experience is worth the attempt. I don't know that every person who does attempt it will finish it (quite the opposite, actually), and I don't know that any person who finishes it will understand it, and I don't know if I'd ever want to sit down in the same room with someone who DOES understand it. It's a book that's been shattered and re-fused—exploded and mortared—on so many different scales that it's better just to let it happen to you, rather than trying to find the internal logic. This is what happens when the world ends in Rosewire: narrative ceases to be an issue.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay...
Last word here: many people have taken Rise to be a sure signal of Hardiner's failing mental facilities. A genius on the cusp of (or in the middle of) a breakdown. Other people have taken it, and so therefore the whole of Rosewire, as a coded map to his current location (or eventual end). So many attempts have been made to squeeze some Harry Hunting truths out of this last book, and, to my knowledge, none of those attempts has actually turned up anything concrete.
But does that mean it's not worth trying?
It's totally within the realm of possibility that Hardiner meant Rosewire to be a series of clues and pointers, and that Rise is his last hint. And even if he snapped and threw himself in the ocean, perhaps Rise and its contents could guide us towards an understanding of his last days. It's worth considering, it's exciting to flay apart, and fist-whitening through it might be, there are some absolutely lovely passages throughout. Even if I can't immediately tell you what any of them mean.
So here we are, at the end of what Hardiner gave us for Rosewire. Supposedly, he was in the middle of the last book, the tenth book, in December 1999. We've found a couple of potential "endings" in the years since (I'll leave them out of this section, as there's no way of knowing who wrote them, and if Hardiner did, whether they rightly belonged to the Rosewire system), but for all intents and purposes, this is it. Rise is the last stop. Rosewire is over.
But, let's remember, Rosewire is not all the man wrote!