Bøker av John Fraser

Two novellas with the common theme of complicity. The Way Back explores the experience of war, flight and rejection. In Elementary Exercises, protagonists engage with authoritarian regimes to escape difficult situations.

This book couples anecdotes with real data to help nature lovers, zoo staff, zoo fans, and even zoo foes understand the many ways zoos are conceptualized, used, and valued, unpacking what seems to happen in the minds of diverse zoo-goers to highlight powerful opportunities for learning, engagement, and activism.

Behaving Well consists of three stories on a related theme: When people are forced to leave their home, in the new place they're often told to 'behave themselves' or be sent back, to to somewhere else. In jail or equivalent, they - everyone - may be let go early for 'good behaviour'. Behaving well is a condition for staying somewhere - even somewhere you don't want to be - and 'going back' may pose dilemmas even more problematic than behaving badly. You find yourself in a chain of ill-fortunes and tragedies - a nakba, a catastrophe as one aspect of it has been called. What other rules exist, except our efforts at 'behaving well'? But, you change, through life; you watch injustices you say you cannot remedy. And your behaviour changes, together with its driving principles. If you want history - you can't have good behaviour. Good Behaviour: Alex, undocumented immigrant, is inspired, shadowed, by the adventures of Alexander, the Great. No one says Alexander behaved well - but he acted! He transformed. He shaped the classical world, scattered Greeks all over, changed cultures, till his suicidal addictions finished him. Alex starts precarious: is jailed, meets a real hero, Valerio - joins the ex-prisoners and outcasts in a barren place. There, they improvise a polity - growing natural drugs, organising an army. Valerio is their inspiration, their guide. Alex teams up with Anicette, whose inspiration is the book 'On Lying'. He spins out of control but his behaviour is consistent. People close to Alex behave in different ways, but all maintain their principles, Anicette as well. Anicette joins with a young ambitious woman, Mélisande. After the death of Alex, we see all who are left have indeed behaved well - at least, consistently. Alex, though, has acted, and imagined: the others, they only react. Anicette concludes, instructing Mélisande - the only judge of our behaviour is ourself. Misconduct: Does behaving well count for something? It doesn't seem to matter for success and failure, revelation or obscurity. In Misconduct, Matti, a political exile with aspirations of humanistic value, tries to make a life - maintaining principles, but surviving - the betrayal of his partner, unofficial enslavement. He wanders, has adventures - becomes a military strategist, travels to the stepps with a lady jockey - but his life is seeing others ride away, betray, or suffer punishments, promotions - which he's been unabvle to prevent or even understand. Ultimately, his organisation gives him the mission - to assassinate the Chief. To do so means his organisation will be expunged - a mass non-violent movement, non-violent, exposed. But for the otther opposition, assassination means a civil war that they are bound to lose. Matti would betray his principles, his own morality - and probably involve all oppositions in disaster. But - loyalty, behaving well or badly - he has no choice. Many real circumstances involve the exiled militants in just this - perfidious - choice.Catastrophe: The catastrophe is that everything happens comes to an end - without a scrap of meaning, still less justice, truth, equity. Some people behave very poorly: Yannick who has 'saved' Hana and enslaved her, Pavel .... for others, the behaviour is just on the edge of awful - Typhaine .... Dr Hoffman sees and can do nothing except register. Hana has character, but no context where the character can assert itself or, indeed, be good or bad.

John Fraser's critical essays explore conflicting attitudes towards self-affirmation and social order. Important concerns that touch these essays are ideas of energy, power, and personal plenitude, and the way in which idealism and heroic intensity can sometimes lead to overstrain and collapse.

John Fraser explores a paradox about the USA: that a country dedicated to rationality, progress, equality and success has always had a strong attachment to the medieval ideas of nobility and chivalry and the high toned violence that goes with them.

Three novellas on friendship: Cities on the Plain, on a Hill is the story of Ahmed and Nico, ex-pats and best friends. The protagonist of Fame is engaged to follow the past life of an ancient, who hopes to achieve a kind of immortality. In Cleansing there are mysteries, situations not resolved, friends who lead astray and who you lead astray.

John Fraser’s latest work of fiction follows the refugee Khalil in two related stories, ‘The Refugees’ and ‘Travels with Strangers’.  We are all refugees seeking an entry to soCaucasmewhere when we’ve left somewhere else. Our knowledge is a raft that’s carried us on lumpy seas. We can forget all that when we arrive. It doesn’t serve. We don’t, of course, stop being refugees, not ever, but we have a lot of living to do while we’re forgetting where we were before.  It’s a commonplace, to say we’re strangers to ourselves – not only when we are alone, but especially when we are in company. Khalil comes from a ruined land, chooses the obvious role in his  new places – acting. On film, where someone else will edit him. He longs to find the treasure we all want – and isn’t his, or ours.  He flits through ‘Travels with Strangers’ too – but people of all spots and stripes are rolling down, shaken from their safe spots – and finish in the Caucasus! A place that once was Eden – and they try to plant and harvest there again. It doesn’t necessarily work. It’s strange, because they’re of all human types. Maybe the world wasn’t made for people, or maybe it’s too far gone for them to find a space to think and talk. And how they talk! Seek love and sex and something – nothing - in between. There must be, of course, conclusion. Khalil’s a fine dancer - exhibition standard. That’s a gift! 

John Fraser's latest work of fiction People You Will Never Meet consists of three thematically-linked trajectories. In the first, two Palestinians escape to humble, even humiliating work in Belgium. They manage to set themselves up as a think-tank above a public dance-hall, and their lives divide between the search for a lofty principle and the drinking and music in the floor below. The link between the levels is provided by a fussy, garrulous first-person narrator, whose own adventures turn out to signify little. There is a party, where the upper and lower worlds mingle, the protagonist dressed as moths and butterflies. The Palestinians move on - one to a ruined Syria, the other to frustration in Europe. The second tale involves a bright country girl, seduced by her teacher with aspirations to a powerful career. She seeks speed, which does not end well for her. In the final tale, the hero aims higher still - a project for the human species. This involves journeying through Eastern Europe, and its underground. Its climax is the burning of a stranger's house, and a long long wait for a slow train...