shamanism – Malcolm's Round Table

Timekeeper II by John Atkinson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In John Atkinson’s 2008 novel Timekeeper, Johnnyboy leaves his dysfunctional Virginia home at fourteen after his father “Bugdaddy” beat him again. In Oklahoma, Chief calls him “Timekeeper” and sends him on a vision quest to find himself. He does, but he is not yet whole.

At the beginning of Timekeeper II, scheduled for a September 21, 2010 release from il Piccolo editions, Atkinson writes, “I went to the Sacred Mountain in the flesh, but didn’t see it clearly until I returned in a ghost world dream.” Timekeeper II isn’t a clock-time, linear novel. It’s a dreamtime novel where all the dualities that haunted Johnnyboy must be brought into harmony in order for Timekeeper to face the world and himself as a fully integrated person.

The dualities arise in Timekeeper’s mind like opposing armies: a humiliated, illiterate man in a world where the ability to read is not only mandatory, but presumed; a man of mixed white and Native American parentage who is unaccepted and foreign in both worlds; a seeker on the path who left home to find himself while leaving his mother and first spiritual teacher Morning Song behind to face the wrath of an abusive father who once said, “Don’t turn Indian on me, boy! I’ll kill you dead in your tracks.”

Timekeeper II is a rare treat, a window that opens and re-opens into a dreamer’s world where events and personages from the world of form and the world of spirit mix and interact and sometimes contradict each other. Neither Chief nor the illusive and powerful Round Woman will give Timekeeper clear and definitive self-help lessons. Instead, he must take on the role of a shaman and enter the ghost world and find spirits who will help him heal himself.

Once again, John Atkinson has conjured up a gritty, highly original story where reality itself turns in upon itself and carries both his protagonist and his readers through the fires of transformation into a world where all conflicts disappear. Timekeeper II is highly recommended for all adventurous readers.

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Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of “Garden of Heaven,” “The Sun Singer” and “Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire.”

Use your imagination and you can fly with crows. Since you won’t be able to speak to unimaginative people about such things, your magic flights can be transformed into poems and scenes in novels.

David looked the crow in the eye while concentrating on the drum beat of his of his own heart until the apartment slipped away and he found himself flying, one crow among many, across the clear sky of the lower world, watching the city with brown eyes as it slid southward into the morning and disappeared.

Wind, the Creator’s breath, we found it sweet and held it as tentatively as flight required with effortless, almost lazy, caresses of our wings. The city before us, north along our route, did not exist until we manifested it out of dream and then perceived our creation, now then, West Wood Street coming out of nothing, then returning, the same, now then Eldorado and the railroad tracks followed by Central and King healthy with people wrapped against the cold, hurrying after their morning tasks unaware they owed their lives to crows, more common and libeled than alchemy’s prima materia, yet mothers of gold in all its forms, then Marietta and Orchid and Packard, less jammed with cars where the city centre held less sway, soon, then Division and the IC tracks until, in the slim distance we gave birth, were birthing without effort or preoccupation with means, a White Rolls Royce Corniche crossing the intersection with Shafer, the top was down and
Eve’s hair was flapping like a crow’s wing, and as we descended, I could just hear the whisper of the car’s 6¾ litre V-8 engine when she passed a ploughed field, reached forward, and made the call.

The harsh ring of the phone tore me out of the air; I hit hallway floor next to the Chippendale claw-and-ball candlestand on the 4th ring. Somewhere between the field and the apartment, reality twisted inside out and expected Siobhan to be calling from the police station.

–I’m here, Cat.

–No, David, it’s Eve. I’m glad you’re up.

–I couldn’t sleep, he said, disoriented and heavy.

–Sweet Jesus, all these birds in my face.

–Perhaps they’re looking for fallen corn in that field to your left.

–You did this?

–Don’t be silly. Nobody controls crows.

Malcolm's Round Table

Tag: shamanism

Review: John Atkinson’s ‘Timekeeper II’

Flying with Crows