Caliban The Pilgrim

Ian Briggs
The Grammar of Witchcraft by David Parry
Mandrake of Oxford, PO Box 250, Oxford OX1 1AP, 92 pp £ 8,99

From the mists of time to the fog of sickening hangover, The Grammar of Witchcra
ft chronicles the final journey of Caliban, the alter-ego of the author David Pa
rry. Once more in search of eternal truth, and in some very unlikely places, Cal
iban the eternal misfit is not so much as searching but trying through various o
rdeals, to open himself to the truth. This of course is not so straightforward.
Beleaguered and beset by the ghosts of dead visionaries who each have something
to say on the matter, Caliban seems at first to be swimming ponderously in the v
ast deeps, and then coming up for air finds humanity wallowing in the shallows.
His vain attempts at interaction, whether half hearted or passionate, result inv
ariably in crossed wired incomprehension, like a sane man and a lunatic attempti
ng to converse without either being certain which of the two he is. It is as tho
ugh Caliban is caught briefly in the wheels of some grotesque kaleidoscope of hu
man caricatures, then catapulted back into the spirit world where the great deba
te rages on crackling like white noise inside his skull. Caliban is both behind
and ahead of his time, and yet coasts along with aloof detachment as though the
eternal now is nothing but a vehicle to carry him through time and space which h
e is neither a part of nor touched by. In the end it is from within himself that
Caliban finds the answers, though unlike the servant of Socrates who is made aw
are of what he (apparently) knew all along by the promptings of his egotistical
master, it is almost in spite of the bombardment of opinions from the spirit wor
ld that Caliban is finally able to break free from the shackles of conventional
thought, and reaffirm what so many have forgotten in our dumbed down numbed down
world; the magic and power of language itself. Both the rock and the driving fo
rce of our cultural identity. The very net which holds everything in our world t
ogether.
Inspirational this may be, but there is a darker side too. The observations and
musings of Caliban which punctuate this narrative are at times bitter, vitriolic
, and laced with a poisonous paranoia that is so much at odds with the character
of the author that one must wonder whether his alter-ego is really a product of
his soul or himself just a detached vehicle for Parryâ s scholarly eloquence. It i
s perhaps significant that my copy of THE GRAMMAR OF WITCHCRAFT is not signed (e
ither by David Parry or Caliban). This is not an easy or comfortable read by any
means, especially as I find the character of Caliban very hard to warm to, but
it is nonetheless packed full of gems, to be mined by any that have the stomach.