Workshops and Critique

Literary Workshops

“Island of Perdition.” I need a literary critique.

Here is the situation. As you know, a war is raging in the Middle East, with fierce attacks between both sides. I, however, have become interested in a character from a literary perspective. He is not any kind of political leader—we already have more than enough of those without reading them again. No. He is a soldier. The soldier who fired the missile that struck a girls’ school.

With my deepest apologies, and with my heart in my hands for those beautiful girls (I have no intention of trivializing their tragedy), I will not dwell on the greatest injustice that caused their deaths—an injustice I mourn and that fills me with grief. Instead, as I have said, I am interested in the character of the soldier.

I have not taken sides and will not take sides with any political faction, neither this one nor the other. My focus, above all, is psychological.

Having clarified this, my literary via crucis begins.

In this story, the war ends in a nuclear explosion, so the character’s actions unfold in the setting of a nuclear winter. After the attack on the school, the enemy launches an atomic bomb and hell is unleashed. Our soldier survives, but he suffers a severe psychological dissociation. The Id, with its instincts, seeks to seize control of the Ego…

The island—already something of a literary cliché—serves here as a projection of his desire to isolate himself from pain.

My problem is the following:

I feel I am not taking enough narrative risks.

I am not convinced by the transition between the Id and the Ego. I need a powerful, novel technique.

Any suggestions regarding plot and style are welcome.

Island of Perdition

I

The ash fell softly yet relentlessly for at least fifteen days, withering the island’s vegetation under its radioactive burden. Once beautiful and vibrant, it now looked as if it had melted away like a model made of black wax. A background hum—like that of a poorly tuned radio—saturated the air, silencing the rebellious creaking of the pier that once connected it to the now-hidden North Atlantic.

“Row harder, coward!” he shouted at himself, the cry dragged away by the wind. “Row, or we sink!”

“Shut up, Enzo,” he answered softly, his lips cracked.

He was a cadaverous soldier named Gorka, rowing frantically through the mist, desperate to reach the shore, fighting against waves determined to hold him back. His lead-fiber uniform, shredded and reeking of brine, lacerated a body covered in festering sores.

Although he arrived alone upon the remnants of a raft, he spoke to himself as though accompanied by another person—a subtle mechanism for surviving solitude and the ocean’s toxicity.

His face, disfigured by radiation, bore the exhaustion of someone who had lost everything in the midst of catastrophe. And for good reason: a hypersonic missile and two weeks of an incipient nuclear winter had sunk his squadron and turned his own consciousness into a new battlefield.

Despite his harrowing odyssey, he finally managed to run the jagged keel aground at the base of a cliff. Without a second thought—rifle slung over his shoulder—he plunged into the freezing water with splashes and curses.

“Rot in hell, Sergeant Sampson!” he shouted again, raising his fist toward the darkened sky. His lower lip trembled, wavering between sobbing and laughter.

“Yeah—screw you!” roared another voice, guttural and defiant. It did not seem to belong to him, yet it came from his throat. It was Enzo’s voice, who lately had grown accustomed to taking control of his will and now joined the celebration.

Leaping and stumbling across the rocks, he forced his way toward the shore. His luck faltered when he tripped and plunged into a hollow in the seabed.

“Up, you useless bastard!” growled the hoarse voice with surprising vitality.

“Get up, degenerate, unless you want to deal with the man-eating sergeant!

“Yes, sir! No, sir!”

Choking on a violent cough, he dragged himself back to the surface.

“You were drowning in a puddle?” Enzo mocked, with an attitude both timid and criminally brazen. “This is ridiculous. You don’t have what it takes to be a man.”

“We’re still alive,” said Gorka.

He turned his gaze toward the coast, hoping to release his shame and regain some measure of sanity. As he examined it, a chill forced his shoulders upward.

“It’s an island… black?”

“I wonder why,” Enzo replied, dripping malice. “If I were you, I wouldn’t trust anyone whose home looks like this damned desolation. Besides, there’s a noise that I find unbearable.”

“What noise?” Gorka asked.

“This noise,” said Enzo.

At that very moment Gorka collapsed, struck down by the roar of static. He clutched his ears, writhing like an eel on the sand. Whether it was real—a remnant of radioactive fallout—or merely another hallucination, he did not know. Either way, the sharpness of the white noise gnawed at his senses.

Then everything went dark.

“Did that hurt?” Enzo asked, laughing sardonically. “Come on, get up. Don’t be so delicate. Get used to it. It’s the sound of the world your own hands helped destroy. And guess what? Only I can turn it off—if you let me take control.”

“Never,” Gorka snapped. “And don’t blame me for anything.”

With great exhaustion he staggered inland. He had just left the beach when he thought he saw several figures. He feared they might be fantastical beings deformed by radioactive rain. He stopped abruptly, clutching his head.

Perhaps he was anticipating reality. It was not the first time his imagination had led him into unknown territory. Perhaps they were human beings like himself. Perhaps.

It struck him as strange that they walked in synchronized steps and carried no weapons on their shoulders, as though they had never belonged to the infernal theater of war.

The rational part of him—the one that still clung to faith in humanity—felt relief.

But Enzo, that sordid creature, tightened every tendon in his body.

“They’ll recognize us as castaways and take us in under the laws of the Geneva Convention,” said a confident Gorka. “All or nothing—they’re civilians. We can ask them for food.”

“You naïve piece of meat,” Enzo spat. “The Geneva Convention no longer exists. Neither does what you call civilization. Now we are targets—and your uniform gives you away. Either you shoot them, or you’ll end up as stew over a fire.”

“You’re despicable,” Gorka rebuked him. “Always expecting the worst.”

Enzo burst into villainous laughter, revealing sharp teeth.

Gorka’s spirit, however, was dragged by an uncontrollable surge of rage. His body curled inward, tense. Anyone witnessing his struggle might have believed it to be a possession.

He clawed the air with his hands, his features twisting into something aberrant and primitive. He bit down on his own forearm and then struck himself across the face until his nose bled.

No witness could quite explain why he inspired such repulsion—that irritating sensation of standing before a creature of base nature. Yet there he remained, fighting it with all his being, bent under the strain, unable to prevent the painful dissonance these violent attacks produced as he scattered the sand.

The full manifestation of Enzo had occurred just after the destruction of his fleet and the rise of the Great Gray Cloud. Since then it had accompanied him.

To calm him, Gorka had been forced to alternate control depending on the level of external danger. But it was obvious: Enzo had become the master of his life’s actions.

“You will not dominate me,” he told himself.

…

(El capítulo continúa)

—"

–Continue reading and experience this text in its original Spanish language at fictograma.com–