Doubles in a Game of Chance
A Review by B. Warden
“Dalton seeks impossible moving targets; the truth, justice, love, a mad genius, a particular office, a working toilet.”
February 24, 2018
Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
Dalton is lost much of the time—not a rare condition in the country of Armendria, as the Kapital seems modeled after an M.C. Escher drawing. He seeks impossible moving targets; the truth, justice, love, a mad genius, a particular office, a working toilet. His logic flows like that of the Sicilian in “The Princess Bride”, with the classic blunder being not a land war in Asia, but fighting the Ruling Class. Dalton is a privileged insider sympathetic to those wanting in, but lacking opportunity to help them—or so it seems.
As Dalton navigates the bureaucratic soup of acronyms, the picture of his world develops. The exploitation of public nature to its ruin, and privatization of all nature that remains clean and pure. Obfuscation of government’s role and society’s duty, the near slavery of immigrant laborers, the failure of the educational system.
Like Chance the gardener in “Being There”, Dalton ends up at the right place at the right time; like Maxwell Smart battling KAOS, he is underestimated at the Ruling Class’s peril. Dalton is lucky in lust and love, a hopeful and noble ghost in the machine for remaking the world.
Jack Remick 