Just the same, the project took a turn after the aborted success of Book One would be followed by the still birth of Book Two six years later, when it became evident that, as an author, my lot was that of a castaway bereft of credit or prospect of repechage. When you make it your mission to write and the literary industry gates all shut to keep you out, notions of ‘why go on’ naturally accompany thoughts of persevering. To embark on Book Three seemed folly. ‘Never Give Up’ and suchlike self-affirming slogans may afford succour to psychotic driven ambition, but they hardly comfort natural doubters floating in the void of oblivion. Still, I liked writing, I liked the work, remained confident in the merits of the Lombard project and determined that I wished to do nothing else than write Book Three – I had unfinished business and, granted, at this time rumblings of “I’ll show them” deep in my mind also played a part in this decision.

In the event, writing Book Three turned out a much more challenging undertaking than anticipated. For one thing, no longer subject to naïve optimism, by now I knew my place and was familiar with the non-existent return of self-publishing; the work stood next to no chance of finding a home on completion. For another, I soon learned that the anger of disappointment hampers creativity – clouds the soul. But I had made my bed, as the saying goes. 

Numerous starts were made, then discarded. The writing didn’t cut it. In light of my circumstances, it seemed absurd to settle for anything not unputdownable; whilst captive of my own ambition, for now I was still caught in the “I’ll show them” snare. It would take more ‘shipwrecks’ before it became obvious that my heart was no longer set on Book Three of the Lombard series. The original concept had lost its allure. The world’s manner of living had so altered since the creation of Book One that writing another Lombard story seemed pointless. On that account, still set on completing what I’d started, I elected to make Book Three the last of the series. The Lombard project would be a trilogy. To this end, Book Three would contain elements from Books One and Two and the whole would be brought to a close. Neat and final. Then I may or may not give up writing.

It seemed a sensible decision. By now, seven plus years had passed since the self-published stillbirth of Book Two. The new plan, I imagined, would take no time to make good on. Most characters were already developed and elements of the narrative would come directly from the prior books. It would be a question of putting in the time and effort, complete the job and move on.

The sooner I set the plan in motion, the sooner I wised up. Marrying Book One and Two to make a worthy Book Three made for much trial and error. It cost time. A great deal of it. Several arrangements, incarnations, changes of scope and ambition. At one point Book Three stretched for 150,000 words while still way away from the end. At another, it forever hung dead midway through a chapter. Then, as it at long last neared completion, events outside my control brought the whole thing to a standstill. I altogether stopped writing. Later, I would realise, the work lacked direction. Again, for all the time and labour involved, it still failed to cut it. I was at my end by then, flailing between the lesser of two evils: to give up or make do with what there was to save face, with the latter option clearly having become my ill-chosen path.

If there still exists a humanity to ponder history in a thousand years from now, it shall be the judge of this current one’s extraordinary response to the recent emergence of a previously unknown virus codenamed SARS-CoV-2. This event need only be mentioned here insomuch as it greatly impacted the ultimate construction of this work.

“A learned fool is more of a fool than an ignorant fool,” wrote Molière. But then again, perhaps, there exists a greater fool still: an idealistic fool. To quote another Frenchman, Albert Camus: “He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.” And then again, continuing the absurdity of it all: Do you see a man who is wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him. (Proverbs 26:12).

I – no less of a fool than most – was never in any doubt that for all the horrors perpetrated by humanity, an immutable longing for freedom beats in the chests of all men and women. On this account, since meeting my father, I’d always wondered how it was that the German masses of the first half of the 20th century could have been coerced to embrace the savage ideology and pseudo-science of one man and his party until such time as they transformed into a docile vicious collective. I’d put it down to the old ways, when access to information was limited, so that even bright minds could be deceived and cowed into submission. I reckoned that such absolute collective compliance could never occur again, not at a time when Artificial Intelligence and reams of digital insights are never more than a fingertip away from all of the people. Yet, it did happen. In the wake of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, by means of government decrees, pseudo-science, judicious threats and a cooperating media, the masses were coerced into adopting the most unnatural of things: self-imprisonment. Not as a result of months or years of indoctrination but in a beat. Not in one nation or continent, but from one end of the earth to the other. Young and old alike forfeited their liberty indefinitely without much of a whisper. They called it ‘The Lockdown’, or ‘Lockdowns’, for it occurred more than once. This greatly touched my mind, killed off the sense of safety from the horrors of the past that I knew. For a time, it sapped the last that still possessed me to write. But then, I found I was released. Into the air under the sun. Free from “I’ll show them” rumblings. Free from worry or conceited ambition. Free of constraints. Nothing remained worth saying, all that mattered now was my own.

I returned to Book Three with the end of the lockdowns and over six months rewrote the whole from the first line without interruption. It fell into place now, found itself, unhampered. Inasmuch as it remains founded on Book One and Two, it still remains Book Three of the Lombard Trilogy. This particular aspect was important. Yet, it stands alone, independent, a self-contained arrangement, I would hope a worthy exploration of being and purity, not unlike the heartbeat moment when Lombard gazes into the wild water of a rocky mountain stream while sitting exhausted on a boulder and realises, in a state of febrile agitation, that all the Gods and Goddesses of Greece and further-off lands are inside of him. That he is everything that can ever be, the light and the abyss, condemned never to better any of it. He is Hashem. He is the purity that exists in a camp fire’s flames. He is seeking-water-to-quench-thirst. To be all there is is daunting.

Finally, I need to mention that this work was completed in 2022, before the events which occurred in Israel on the seventh of October 2023 and all that followed. Since the book is about my business, it is also about Jews – I could never help being my father’s son, and, as stated earlier, the SARS-CoV-2 proceedings made enough of an impression on my mind to elicit the introduction of a whole chapter dedicated to the Jews.

Naturally, in the course of my life, I heard, read about and experienced Jew-hatred; still, in a sense it was my good fortune to be born and grow up in the post-World War Two Holocaust era, at a time when its manifestation in Europe was largely condemned or self-censored. I guess the excesses of depravity to which humanity had sunk within living memory had left many too awed or perturbed to broadcast their prejudices or engage in the age-old sport of ‘Get the Jews’. Guilt, shame, possibly even contrition, may also have played their part here. As my time went by and I grew older, it looked like I would be spared the worst of it. It wasn’t to be.

It’s one thing to read about the horror of Jew-hatred, or even to hear of it first hand from the lips of a father who had withstood its extremes and warned “It will happen again”; but little can prepare the heart for the sights and sounds that engulfed great hunks of humanity after Israel dared to retaliate against her abusers’ latest savage distractions. Women coming together so unleashed that they would chant for Jewesses’ defilers and Jewish children’s killers, is a sight to behold. Men marching with them so impaired that they should glorify fellow male slaughterers of a mind to shelter from reprisals behind their own unprotected children, makes for a bone-chilling concept. And the spectacle of their combined banner-waving armies calling for the people of Israel to be driven from the land into the sea is awe-inspiring. On the other hand, that all such dread should be performed while masquerading as Palestinian* supporters, exhibiting the same malign spirit as the Palestinian people’s self-appointed leaders, is predictable. Wretched Israel, they offer, is to be loathed for going all out to protect her own children while her ravishers ought to be lauded for trading the blood of their own.

• * Since these days it is quite the fashion to express strong if not generous opinions about Israel by way of Palestine, I thought I may as well indulge in some unabashed submission of my own. Palestine, Germany, Russia, Spain, Egypt, South Africa and North, East and West Etcetera – Israel is the original universal “nigger”. No matter her many hues, no one wants her to move into their neighbourhood, never mind old Judea. Of such stuff are men and women made. On this occasion, though, she stayed put and fought, and for now is still standing. I guess that, the same as canny stout-lover-islanders of one Church or another, even the most hapless child of Israel needs a place to eat, piss, fuck, bleed, love and defecate. Which raises the question: who did the man who bequeathed Mona Lisa to the world have in mind when he wrote “Some there are who are nothing else than a passage for food and augmentors of excrement and fillers of privies, because through them no other things in the world, nor any good effects are produced, since nothing but full privies results from them.”

For all that, I’m satisfied that I committed to include a chapter on the Jews in this work. Indeed, it may even be that Jews wander across all of its many pages, even if it’s all apropos of nothing, for their lot and this great theatre is merely a small lightning in the storm. For myself, I have now finished my business. Released, spent and recompensed. I must very much thank Mozart and Labelle’s ‘Lady Marmalade’ among many others for being there together with the many of the things I was offered free.