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The Waterworks

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So you won't think I'm exaggerating about the ellipsis, here's an example copied straight from the book:

At last, after two years of planning permissions, historical surveys, building regulation, Grade-II listed building permissions and the most extraordinary three-week transformation, the Waterworks micropub opened its door on Friday, May 4 2018. Scheduled Saturday “Park runs” of 3 miles around the Waterworks for walkers and joggers are fun events and attract lots of families and people of all ages and fitness. In short, the plot is crap, the characters are crap, the pacing is crap, and the writing is crap. If you like crap, you'll love this. If not, then don't bother unless you can find the version of the book that all the big-time critics seem to have read and rave about. (This other version must exist since there is no way they could have been reviewing the load of crap I waded through.) The narrator is a newspaper editor, who is in a good position to understand New York in this period of rapid change, as the city expands at an incredible rate after the North's victory in the Civil War while remaining under the corrupt government of the Ring led by Bill Tweed. A symbol of the changing city, which is the source of the title, is the vast reservoir behind high walls in the north of the city, providing water to supply industry and the expanding population. I bought, and still have, the original hardcover edition, from 1994, when Simon Schama classified it in the review in the New York Times as a "startling and spellbinding new novel". There was another review in the Times that year mentioning a "haunting new novel" and later, on the author's death, a consideration of "a dark mystery set in Manhattan in the 1870s, involving a journalist who vanishes and an evil scientist."When Martin is at last well enough to talk, he reveals what he discovered after being kidnapped and imprisoned by Simmons to stop him from asking questions about Augustus. Augustus Pemberton had faked his death. Along with other wealthy old men of the city, each of whom was terminally ill, Augustus is being kept alive by Dr. Sartorius. Sartorius, a brilliant and innovative Army surgeon during the Civil War, has invented treatments that were then unknown to medicine: blood transfusions, dialysis, bone marrow transplants and others. His dark secret is that young children must be sacrificed for their blood and somatic cells. Dr. Sartorius considers himself innocent of their actual deaths, as each child "died from fright" and not from his nefarious medical attention. With the assistance of the corrupt Tweed Ring, which runs New York (and with which several of the old men are connected), Sartorius has built a secret sanitarium in which he is free to experiment and administer his treatments without any supervision. The large fireplace with the connecting flue to the coppers was also found, the fireplace itself now housing a new wood burning stove. Those who don’t like Poe and are put of by the reference should also know that Doctorow said he thought his namesake a “first rate bad writer”. He was aware of his faults as well as his appeal. Waterworks is far more sophisticated and carefully written than Doctorow’s doomed namesake generally managed. Another touchstone might be Wilkie Collins’ Woman In White, especially thanks to this novel’s clever flirtation with the supernatural, and fascinating, troubled character of the narrator. For me, McIlvaine is a marvellous creation. His voice is convincing, steady, reliable, wise and ideally suited to the strange and gripping tale he spins out. As Simon Schama explains in another (far warmer) contemporary review, it’s actually just right that he should have this “mutilated diction, broken by elisions and compressions of thought and utterance”.

The press is realistically presented: "As a jobless editor I was still jealous of my exclusive. Sitting there in the hospital room, I experienced additionally the feelings of a private person who shudders in contemplation of the prospect, of serious matters of his own intimate knowledge, subjected to the low standards and deplorable practices of the newspaper profession." Coming months, we will animate three future scenario’s, one of them ‘the valley of debt-free money’. More to come! Absolutely, but you don't really figure out why until fairly late in the story. Water is actually very present throughout the story in different forms (rivers, reservors, what have you) and in many places the narrator uses it to make important metaphorical connections. Also, on reflection, a lot of very important events in the book seem to happen near water of some kind.It’s easy to raise objections here. The idea that a writer like Doctorow would feel the need to stretch a book out is absurd. That sentence Dibdin quoted doesn’t make sense – but only as he presents it, shorn of its context. Actually, this is a novel of startling clarity, for all that Doctorow leaves out in those ellipses. Recently, we went international. Since May 20, the waterworks is the centerpiece at the Dutch Pavilion of the Architecture Biennale of Venice, and on June 14, we published the English video animation of ‘The Waterworks of Money’ (part I, part II will be published at the end of the summer): And they are indeed beyond easy comprehension. The story that McIlviane tells is every bit as remarkable and transgressive as that opening promises. It’s so strange, in fact, that I hestitate to outline too much here. Those yet to have the joy of reading Waterworks should also be able to enjoy its surprises. Suffice to say that Pemberton’s hunt for his father takes him into troubling territory and yet also on a fantastically entertaining journey. My Review: Mel-O-Drama!! The novel is set in 1871, and like any good sudser pits one lone man against a system of evildoers and manipulators. Adding to the pleasures are steampunky elements like technology out of its time, a villainous doctor aiming to create immortal men, and double-super-secret hidden bases that are in plain sight. The novel falls in two genres I'm interested in: Gothic and SF horror. Specifically, the story takes place in New York in 1871. E.L. Doctorow is excellent at creating a picture of the time. The corrupt politics of Tammany Hall. Maimed veterans of the American Civil War out on the street begging for alms.

The Waterworks has been awarded a Green Flag every year from 2012 to 2021. This award recognises the best open spaces in the UK. Park events Serving eight local ales and twelve local ciders, nothing comes further than 28 miles. CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) popped in to see what was going on, and sip their way through the list. This novel has been described as a kind of tribute to Poe by Doctorow (whose parents gave him his first name Edgar in specific tribute to the writer) and it’s a superb detective novel in the tradition started by The Murders In The Rue Morgue. The policeman Donne is a classic sleuth. The man they end up hunting, the mysterious Dr Sartorious, has wonderful tinges of Poe’s creepy villains, as well as all those morally discomforting Victorian men of science like Dr Jekyll and HG Wells’ Invisible Man. The climactic scenes in the Croton Reservoir are as ghoulish as anything from the original Edgar’s opium-inspired nightmares. With the help of many international partners and contributors, we launched the first chapter in Dutch at Follow the Money in our home country the Netherlands in October 2022. Our first Dutch-language publication won a journalistic prize and was nominated for another one a few months ago. The works of art were exhibited from 16 October 2022 until 29 January 2023 at Rijksmuseum Twenthe, and are currently on view in the exhibition ‘The Future of Money’ at the KunstMuseum The Hague (14 April, 2023 until 8 September 2023), one of the leading museums in the Netherlands. An enlarged copy of the artwork is momentarily on display at the lobby of the Dutch Ministry of Finance and at Rabobank. Moreover, the works were exhibited at several festivals and educational institutes, and we gave tens of talks and organized tens of workshops based on the maps and Dutch animations last year.People didn’t take what Martin Pemberton said as literal truth, he was much too melodramatic or too tormented to speak plainly. Women were attracted to him for this - they imagined him as some sort of poet, though he was if anything a critic, a critic of his life and times. So when he went around muttering that his father was still alive, those of us who heard him, and remembered his father, felt he was speaking of the persistence of evil in general.”

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