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Conclusion to New York Times Best selling series

Nick Bantock launches new book, Pharos Gate

LOUISE LOIK

Editor

THE PHAROS GATE

“.... Griffin and Sabine leave England and the Sicmon Isles heading for Egypt. Griffin decides to travel overland through Spain and Turkey while Sabine slips secretly across the Southern Seas. Leaving their homes for good, and pursued by the relentless threat of Frolatti and his creatures, the couple are magnetically pulled towards Alexandria and the Pharos Gate where they hope to find their meeting ground.”

 

The book series that Bowen Islanders helped push into the global limelight 25 years ago, has finally reached its conclusion with the seventh book by Nick Bantock, The Pharos Gate: Griffin and Sabine's Missing Correspondence.

 The Griffin and Sabine Trilogy, followed by The Morning Star Trilogy, wound up in millions of homes around the world, even triggering an interview with the author on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The first three books alone spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.

When he released Griffn and Sabine, he was living on Bowen Island, feeling enormously supported by the community. “The people on Bowen were a part of the jungle drums. In a couple months the books went from being unknown to a best seller,” says Bantock from Victoria.

This last book fills in information chronologically, between Book three, “The Golden Mean,” and Book four, “The Gryphon.” Consistent with Bantock’s play on shadows and light, the reader never knew, prior to this publication, that there was any “Missing Correspondence.“ This book lurked in the in-between-place, like a secret train platform leading to Hogwarts. Created in a linguistic and artistic style consistent with the other books, this new dialogue that flows between the letters, gives the reader a satisfying conclusion to an ephemeral tale.

The author, also an artist, created wild and wonderful art blended with storytelling both on the book pages and on the pages of letters inside of envelopes attached to pages. Readers could open the envelopes and follow the correspondence of the main characters in each trilogy.  As a result, Bowen’s post office became a starring location for media coverage of the best-selling books. News crews raced to Bowen to film the little island post office. At the time, the post office was inside what is now the side door at the library, and opened into what is now the librarian’s office. “It was a geographical geiser,” says Bantock.

Bantock never abandoned his winning style of experiential books that centred on correspondence.

In Pharos Gate, there is no change of from the previous books; nothing that would hint at the changing times of the author’s reality.

In ’91, when the first book came out, computer technology was still, for the most part, in dial-up mode  and the internet was still called the World Wide Web. In spite of the weight of today’s information overload and easy answers, readers will enjoy the change of pace demanded by The Missing Correspondence.” This new book resists the times within which it has arrived, luxuriating in detail, in hints, allusions, and dancing shadows.

Like all the books before it, The Pharos Gate requires time for thoughtful reflection and providing sustenance to what may be, a starved imagination.

“I learned that a kind of robbery can take place when we don’t leave room for imagination.” Bantock believes that removing nuance or conjecture, “the imagination is deprived of sustenance. He explains that the art in his books are not there to help explain the words, but are of equal importance to the words.  “When we are a subservient creatures of the word and use the images to mimic what has been written, both are devalued by definition, and it devalues the imagination of the reader.”

Bantock says he writes the words and creates the images “with equal respect; a marriage of equals between two forms of logic and intuition.”

Much has been made by the media about the characters of Bantocks books being a representation of the dueling parts of his subconscious, logic and intuition. Bantock says, “what the artist produces should be more significantly up front than the person behind it.” 

With Pharos Gate, if the reader doesn’t understand the significance of a conversation or a drawing, it’s easy to jump to the computer to get an answer, which Bantock hopes the reader avoids. “I am trying to create things that speak directly to the subconscious, and tap into a collective unconscious.”

“What has changed,” he says, regarding about the era of this conclusive book, “is the gestalt of how it is perceived. The colours around it has changed, but very little in the art and writing has changed.” He explains that you get meaning from what isn’t there, by casting a light not on the subject, but on the shadows. With Pharos gate, the world of the reader “is moving faster and we are more spinny. The faster we go, the more spinny we get, and the less we can understand ourselves.”

“I would like to think that a lot of young people will pick it up, and it gets them thinking about thinking.” He says that with the overload of information and technology, he hopes a new generation of readers “will switch off their technology, even just long enough to fully focus on the book, and how the narrative moves; to think it through, just for a short period of time.”

Bantock wants the people of Bowen to know that the success of this series is based on the success of Griffin and Sabine. “It’s because the people of Bowen took the book to heart. They saw it as a natural part of themselves They were instrumental in letting the world know about the book. The book belongs to the island.”