Written by Will Self
Illustrated by Quentin Blake
4.5-5.0/5.0 🪐🪐🪐🪐🪐
「The moon drives everyone mad - you know that, well enough. But this is no lycanthropic or otherwise spooky metamorphosis: it’s far stranger than that. 」
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兩位天才大師的夢幻聯動，一次偉大的合作。書的前半本是Self以夜遊為主題寫的一篇被劃分成六節的意識流寫作(或者就叫六個片段)。後半本全部是Blake老先生的畫。專為此書所畫，一系列以旅行幻想為主題的水彩畫。
神秘浪漫的夜間旅行，是星空，是宇宙，是仰頭即可感受到的風，是深夜海邊凝視深淵般的無際海水，是月光編織的奇幻夢境。我們坐在八腳裝置上，用其他的月光夜遊故事取悅彼此。這是深夜和月亮秘而不宣的共謀。
Blake的水彩畫以黑暗、奇幻的幽默講述了在深夜穿越未知風景的經歷。伴隨著這種獨屬於Blake的老派英式幽默，藝術敘事來自Self 永遠輝煌的洞察力和想像力，留下令人回味的文本。Self憑藉特有的敏銳性，將自我融合入了事實、虛構和記憶，並以最激進的方式傳送給了讀者。沿著意想不到的軌跡出發，以此回應Blake穿越時空的視覺嬉戲。兩個處於力量高峰期的創造性頭腦將文字和影象進行了結合，以此對話。
該書於2019年下半年出版，豆瓣上至今只有一則短評。那位寫點評的朋友說，「這是22年三月到五月的褪黑素。」
還挺對的。
因為我看完了，也依舊睡不著。
一如我所知道的褪黑素 —— 一種能夠幫助人體調整自然作息幫助睡眠的荷爾蒙，一種我吃了跟沒吃一樣的保健品藥片。
我看完反而很想出去，找個一樣睡不著的人一起夜遊，或是幹點別的，不可告人的那種。
我只想在別人構建的情慾裡，醉生夢死每一天。
片段摘錄：
P18: The moon drives everyone mad - you know that, well enough. But this is no lycanthropic or otherwise spooky metamorphosis: it’s far stranger than that. You rise from your bed and, leaving your nightclothes lying coiled and cooling on the floor, you flee out the back door into the garden. The moonlight has electroplated the frivolous flowers, and so they range along their narrow beds, sentinel and sinisterly beautiful. You stand, confused by such clarity: is this night time at all, or a scene being shot in full daylight, in such a way that all concerned - actors, directors, producers, designers and audience - can readily suspend disbelief?
P23: North of here, on another moonlit night three centuries ago, the English and the Dutch fleets had at one another with ball and canister shot; to the south, half a millennium still earlier, a prosperous city of churches and well-founded merchants’ houses, on a stormy night when the moon raced along behind a ragged jalousie of cloud, shrugged, groaned and, turning over, slid beneath the relentless swell. Even by day, this is a debatable land - a melange of dank marsh and parched moor - and under moonlight its several planes slide into and out of each other, fold over and under, as the little car grumbles to the end of the metalled roadway.
P24: You’ve been sitting beside me in silence all evening, knowing better than to remark upon the cosmic solecism of a driver powered by ethyl alcohol - and you say nothing when I unclip the canvas roof, and open it out so that the interior of the car is filled with liquid moonlight. The great Polynesian navigators, who plied the Pacific in their reed-woven boats, thought of themselves not as moving between A and B, but as fixed points around which the cosmos of stars, planets, moon and islands revolved. You can appreciate how this allowed them to attune themselves to a vast amount of sensory and perceptual data - from the wind on their upturned faces, to the flotsam borne on the ocean currents, and the angles at which moonbeams subtend - all of which is lost to us in our own era of angular geometry.
P32-33: The rust was the colour of water; the water was the colour of rust. The coffee was also the colour of rust, and it cost a single rust-coloured drachma. When the cup had been drained there was a small crescent-shape of rusty sediment at the bottom. The clanking and rattling of the anchor chain being raised strongly implied that a counter-weight had been chucked overboard, and even though there was only this evidence, I nevertheless felt it was me who’d been pitched unceremoniously into the wine-dark Aegean. Oh, and you were there as well, wrapped up with me in an awkward embrace. Down we went, sliding from one cold fathom to the next colder one. Looking up we saw this: the two spiralling trails of silvery bubbles twining around each other to form the genome of our watery dissolution - while, above this, the moon lay face down in the sea.
P38: Surely this is the primordial form of love itself: at once familiar - and completely inconnu… What can she be thinking? As Yuri Gagarin transitions to Valentina Tereshkova… the Moon draws us into her, rendering us all female in such heavy swell…. That was the point of it, surely, the epitome of those phallic craft… designed by ex-Nazis, flown by men with the Right Stuff… they embarked on the most subversive journey ever, its manifest destination quite different from their latent intent - which was what? Perhaps they felt that by responding to these immemorial ebbs and flows they would somehow reconnect to the primordial ocean … by landing in this barren and arid place they would re-green their poisoned world …. We’re in agreement, aren’t we, you and I? Tonight is our night - the fulfilment of our dreams. And how can mere sublunary terror match up to the sublime immensity of space?
意識流文字的書評我一向不太會寫，摘錄彌補書評缺陷。
Quentin Blake在此書中的部分作品節選：
