Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
– William Blake, “The Tyger”
There’s always a mystery in the genre of spy novels, woven into intricate plot twists. Characters display the highest skill in cunning and stealth as they find themselves at the ground zero of the eternal struggle between the forces of order and chaos, friends and foes. A spy novel is always a vast geography and a chess match of two, with the fate of nations and all of humanity at stake. There’s no room for the unexplained in the game – because the secret always comes to the surface.
In the novel “Incredible Spy Detective” we not only see the rational side of the world through the canonical view of an MI6 agent, but also the irrational perspective of those who create their own universes. The method of active imagination, known from the works of Carl Jung, found its reflection in the detective story where characters travel not only across the globe (Moscow, London, Paris, Florence), but also between eras, drawing knowledge from the works of their predecessors. As soon as the key to understanding the unconscious processes is found, the irrational becomes the unique detective method and begins to supplement the strict and logical worldview of the agent.
Alchemy is an algorithm of inner transformation, the personal evolution of an individual that permeates the works of great artists throughout the centuries. In the novel, the reader will encounter the works of Dante Alighieri, William Blake, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Sandro Botticelli, John le Carré, and will read the author’s translation and interpretation of famous texts and paintings – from a new angle.
“Incredible Spy Detective” is dedicated to all those who, midway upon the journey of life, began to find themselves, and to all poets, misunderstood and lone architects of their universes, serving the craft of the artist, composing sweet fruits of illusion with the precious core of truth inside – to be carried through centuries, passed on from generation to generation, against all odds.
“So you’re a pathological liar.”
“No, I am an MI6 agent.”
[Russia, Moscow, Khamovniki District]
“So I go up to him asking who he is and what he’s doing in my home,” the female voice spoke from the stand, and from the audience, in the allocated logical pauses, delighted laughter sounded. “And he goes, ‘I am an MI6 agent’.”
The voice was deep, with a hoarseness common in sociopaths and artistic hysterics. There was no more microphone feedback noise, the other speakers at the table on the press-conference stage were silent in fascination and didn’t interrupt the monologue. The camera shutters occasionally clicked and the flashes whistled.
“I tell him to get the hell out – because I didn’t invite him,” the woman continued. “But he’s not leaving.”
She spread her arms theatrically – her nails were a bright neon green – and the pattern of a tattoo flashed on her open wrist from under the white jacket, it snaked up her forearm.
“So I tell him: ‘Take your clothes off, then.’ And he did.”
The audience roared, it was mostly the women who shrieked with laughter, the men were reacting more calmly. The other speakers clapped, bulged their eyes grotesquely, motioned falling from their chair – and the woman was satisfied with the effect she had, though she was simply giving an ironic and restrained smile.
It was impossible to tell if she was being serious.
Richard clapped, too – because he was supposed to, and because he recognized the glimmer of wit in all the absurdity of the joke.
The voice from the stand belonged to the writer under a pen name Stella Fracta, the author of the new detective bestseller ‘Cats Don’t Drink Wine’ about a murder on Italian vineyards. The story about an MI6 agent that she just told to the audience was a product of her psychedelic visions – an author’s method of applying the active imagination.
Richard read all of her books – more than once. MI6 ran a two-week intensive course on all her works, novels and otherwise, with detailed analysis and examples, methodical manuals on her system of symbols and historical notes.
MI6 has been in chaos for the last five months. An unprecedented case of the revelation of the secrets of the Poets, an alchemical society, was deemed a potential threat: that was normally the way that political secrets, stolen by hackers and spies, were exposed to the public eye, with a taunt and a pleasure of impunity.
Among the Poets were famed artists of different eras. The formulas of the Great Work encrypted in their art were passed onwards from chosen ones to chosen ones in forms inaccessible to the understanding of a layman – and the author of the novel that’s gained phenomenal popularity made a marketable detective plot out of it!
