The Sussex Variations
Dooney’s is serializing, on a weekly basis, Brian Fawcett’s manuscript The Sussex Variations. Edited by Karl Siegler, this is one of the last books Fawcett completed before his death, from pulmonary fibrosis, on February 27, 2022. Fawcett is a founding co-editor of dooneyscafe.com since its inception in 2001.
This page functions as a table of contents for the fifteen chapters of the serial.
Read Stan Persky's elegy for Brian Fawcett, Joined at the Mind.
Brian Fawcett thinks about death, on a pig farm in 1962, in the trenches of World War I and during the London Blitz. Ch. 11 of “The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars.”
Brian Fawcett, coming of age on an English pig farm in 1962, reads Voltaire’s “Candide” and wonders if the whole world is sliding back into the perils of “blind faith.” Ch. 12 of “The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars.”
Brian Fawcett, coming of age on a Sussex pig farm in 1962, is trying to secure the facts in a world that seems doomed by nuclear weapons and a population explosion. Ch. 13: Doom, of “The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars.”
Brian Fawcett learns the rules and wisdom of life and war, at least according to Ronald Surry, on a pig farm in England in 1962. Yes, a coming-of-age story but, more important, a story of coming-into-intelligence, which belongs to the world, not to the individual. Ch. 14 of “The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars.”
The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars: (Ch. 15) Nightingales, and a Short Journey Through the Darkness
In the concluding chapter of Brian Fawcett’s “The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars,” the young Canadian acquiring an “education” on an English pig farm in 1962 is still learning about the birds and the boars. “Nightingales, and a Short Journey Through the Darkness” features robins, starlings, nightingales and a deadly dangerous boar.