Böcker 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.

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...