#gordon white

I’m up to the third issue, but I just have to blabber on about the protagonist’s second dream, the one in which he’s on a train. All the hints and hooks and seemingly minor incidents in the story up to now feature in the dream, but at the same time, some of these allusions are obviously “premonitions”. I put “premonitions” in quotes because in Providence, time is kind of a permanent, motionless thing where every thing that happens sets up echoes in the past and the future. (It makes more sense in the actual graphic novel than in my words.)

The premonitions are unmistakably of the Holocaust, still twenty or so years into the protagonist’s future. Stating it flat out like that doesn’t begin to convey the growing atmosphere of dread, of foreboding. It’s still just disturbing little hints, but it chills me to the bone! It’s almost as if the premonitions reflect something approaching him that’s even worse, if possible, than the Nazi genocides.

I originally started reading the novel due to Gordon White’s praise of it. He described it as having a genuine magician’s understanding of time, and that each event thus sends echoes down through the past and the future. I’m beginning to see what he meant.