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Melly Cheval never
seized the initiative in the Sixties' Counter-Culture Revolution; it rather passed him by. He found himself merely an observer,
never a participant. He remained hidden by a haze of smoke yet was desperate to emerge; to become a full player; to achieve
the status of hero. Melly was suffering mid-life
crisis.
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Talish Thorensen
was an undernourished crack-addict who spent her days and nights as a hooker on the streets of Amsterdam. She carried a history
for which no-one cared; not until she met Melly.
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Melly passed through
Amsterdam en route to viewing a solar eclipse. It was to bring closure for him; it was to be a new beginning. Meeting Talish
fired his imagination, and events over the following year fuelled the actions of this man's hopeless attempts to control events. But it was already too late. Wrong-footed from the outset, Melly engaged all around him in a
pitifully egotistical search for approval. It was to be his undoing on many
levels.
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Melly experiences A
Field in Arlon as part-reality and part-fantasy. Writing imaginative notes, he sets out to detail events as
he would have liked them played but finds, instead, a vehicle through which he rejects himself; then, he rejects Talish. As an observer, Melly is hapless. As a participant,
he is rejected. As a hero, he is found wanting...
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Melly
returns to Amsterdam to come to terms with his creation and, ultimately, to bury his ghosts. It is both an eye-opening experience
and one at which he rushes blindly. The cost to him and to his cast of characters is overwhelming.
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