The Town Manager

[Nemonymous]

THE TOWN MANAGER - Carnes – Né Scar? – ends with a potential scar, ie DUSTROY TROLY branded into his chest. Echoing the ‘sabbaticals’ in PURITY, the Town Manager is a single entity perhaps but with a series of ‘ ‘ ‘wrapping’ between each version of himself, which makes it even more significant when the (self-knowingly undependable) Narrator eventually emerges from the last sabbatical as this very entity during a ‘Twin Peaks’ like coffee shop scene.
This story is overtly an extended metaphor for the Credit Crunch with a version of the Town Manager giving a ‘fiscal stimulus’ like Gordon Brown ‘saving the world’ – which makes the “He has left us” horrific. Here the stimulus creates a fairground with a Kafkaesque lavatory-complex etc. Futility and degeneration, bleeding the town with each renewal of ‘fiscal stimulus’. The dead lamp at the beginning reminds me of the cordless TV in PURITY.
Less than overtly, however, the story is the (explicit) soup the Narrator feeds us. Mayonaisse, Salami, Eraserchest? At least we can survive the Meltdown on the bare ration of words, but if we can ‘enrichen’ the words into things-in-themselves or by making them into an even greater feast of literature for ourselves by revealing ‘nonsensical’ (as well as meaningful!) assonances and accretions, then so be it. And that’s what I call pure intention.
“We have to know.”