It becomes clear that Pierce's mother, Winnie, had separated from his father, Axel, on discovery of his homosexuality.
(Perhaps significant that Axel, like Fellows Kraft, is homosexual).
Winnie and the eight year old Pierce relocate from Brooklyn to deeply rural Bondieu, Kentucky -- so isolated that the library service is via strapped boxes despatched from the state capital.
One of the books that arrives provides the matter for Pierce's imaginary world of Adocentyn: a massive compendium of the ineffible entitled "A Dictionary of Dieties, Devils, and Daemons of Mankind" by one Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle. It's endpapers "showed a mass of ruins . . . broken antique torsos, huge headstones covered in clearly cut but unintelligible words, toppled pillars sunken in tufts of grass, arches, urns, capitals, obelisks . . . . One sad square of split marble half-engulfed in forgetful earth bore a single, deeply-incised word: AEgypt."
Hamlet of Bondieu reflects the usual geographic temporal/spiritual doubling: the next town over is Good Luck.
Winnie's brother, the widower Sam Oliphant, on young Pierce: "'Lives in a world of his own,' Sam said to Winnie; though the opposite always seemed as true to Winnie, who knew him better: that Pierce lived in a world not his at all."
Pierce's opposite is Sam's oldest son, the crude Joe Boyd, whose secret club -- in contradistinction to Pierce's mystical Invisible College -- is modeled on fraternal organizations such as the Elks. The primary activity of Joe Boyd's club, The Retrievers, is cleaning an old chicken coop of encrusted guano, whereas Pierce leads his cousins into imaginary, caped and robed adventures in the countryside. Joe Boyd relishes books with obscure facts (just as Pierce absorbs books on obscure demons) and his imaginitive play is drawing elaborate stick-figure panoramas of military battles.
Sam had thought that Joe Boyd would provide an alternate role model -- "mentor, guide, and friend" -- for Pierce from his father Axel. "To Pierce, though, Joe Boyd with his sad, minatory eyes and jailbird haircut remained just what he had always seemed, the viceroy or dark archangel of Sam, the one who brought him Sam's wishes and instructions moral or practical, lessons Pierce could never learn."
As opposed to the desultory service model of Joe Boyd's literally "chicken-shit" club, Pierce's Invisible College in some manner dictates to him that he play destructive pranks such as breaking storm windows and leaving Sam's tools out to rust.
In the secrecy of his room, Pierce reigns over the Imaginary College with boyish eroticism, dreaming: "In the past, once, somewhere, somewhen, kings and gods had gone naked: armed and crowned and shod sometimes, but naked where it mattered, filled maybe with the same grave elevation that filled Pierce when in private games he as liberator, as ancient king come home again, would order his people to throw off their garments, and be as they had been -- he leading the way, putting aside his (bath) robe and reclining in easeful nakedness, a Royal Crown in his hand and magnanimity in his heart, the world returned to antique gaiety. In the past there had been a Golden Age."
In childhood, one can see with clarity the lost, forgotten Golden Age: "In the past, in the Old World, there had been empires whose geographies were now lost, the maps no longer had room for them, filled up as they were with classroom countries; empires still somehow in existence, though beyond the demarcated globe, undersea or underground. Pierce committed to memory lists of their interchangeable gods and godlets, the air and water had been crowded with them, potent but not omnipotent -- a comfort somehow, they were strong friends or difficult enemies but not all-seeing, not everywhere at once; the wise could compel them, back them (or maybe that was sometime later, when they had grown smaller): could bring them to mirrors, draw them into statues, talk with them. Magi, said Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle."
The gods expulsion from the physical world, and consequent end of the Golden Age, perhaps presages Pierce's own descent from the pagan imaginary of childhood into Catholic religious instruction: "When Jesus came the gods had hidden or died, the air had emptied; and at that time too, though maybe not all at once, and not because of His coming but only because the existence of a new order somehow cancelled out the other even retroactively (a wind blowing backward through time that brought down the collonades and temples and the groves or oak), those empires had fallen."
The other lost world, lost skill is the realm of childhood imagination: "Pierce would forget, as all adults forget, the effort required of children making believe, the concentration, no, the expansion, of the will, the conscious effort to erase the conscious decision to pretend . . . . When those gardens were all shut up in him, those wells capped, Pierce would not remember how good he had been at it."
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
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