June 2001

In this astonishing volume of autobiography, John Moriarty's earlier works of mystical philosophy, 'Dreamtime' and 'Turtle Was Gone a Long Time', a given a biographical grounding. Inhabited by all that he reads and perceives, Moriarty recovers lost forms of sensibility and categories of understanding, reconciling them gloriously within the arc of his life.

'Nostos' is a Greek word meaning 'homecoming'. In its plural form it was the name of an extensive body of literature in ancient Greece about the Greek heroes who returned from the Trojan Wars. Most of this literature has perished, but we do have 'The Odyssey', describing the long homecoming of Odysseus to Ithaca. Moriarty's book assumes that for various reasons humanity is now exiled from the earth, but by re-imaging it ourselves as invoiced in a common destiny, it enacts a homecoming, a 'nostos' to it.

In pursuit of this enterprise the book unwinds, or better it suffers, an Ariadne's skein of sponsoring and enabling myths, not all of the indigenous, some of them inaugurating an alternative to our Western way. 'Nostos' is a continuous narrative describing early on how its author lost his world as surely and completely as the Aztecs lost theirs when Cortez came ashore. Thereafter, in places as far apart as neolithic North Kerry and London, Periclean Athens and Blackfoot dancing ground, Manitoba and Mexico, the Grand Canal in Dublin and the Grand Canyon in Arizona, Kwakiutl coast and Connemara, the author fights his way to a kind of rest, to a requiem, at the heart of things as they terribly and respendently are.

Overall, 'Nostos' is a book that challenges the reader.