Island of Demons Read Online Free PDF

oleaginated back.
    â€œWould you like Mr Bonnet to write it on the reverse for you?”
    â€œLovely,” she cooed. Jacob relaxed and smirked. I went and took down the painting, pulled a pencil from my inside pocket. I hesitated at what I knew was another defining moment. I could jot down something obscene and insulting, draw a vicious caricature of Mrs van Damm, sketch my own face with extended tongue. Instead, I looked at my happy parents, Vorderman chestswelling and relaxed, sighed and wrote “Doggie in Pastiche”. Yet in some strange way, I was enjoying this, biting down on my own pain and humiliation in a toothache-sucking fashion. Dr Freud was teaching us to call that “masochism”.
    Over by the drinks table, knocking it back without dissimulation, was a bunch of my contemporaries at the art school. As I approached, they turned to face me and greeted me with undisguised sniggers.
    â€œAt least the food and wine is the real stuff,” smirked Bakker, a skinny, stooped figure in a threadbare jacket, who passed for something of a radical in student circles.
    â€œMeaning the art isn’t?”
    He fluttered fingers of protesting innocence. “Did I say that? People come for different things.” He poured another glass to show what he had come for. At least they were using glasses, not swigging directly from the bottle. “The last public event that was sure enough of an audience to go uncatered was probably the crucifixion. But what happened to constructivism, expressionism, surrealism … even impressionism, for God’s sake?
    â€œThis stuff …” he swung the glass unsteadily round the room “… isn’t what you’d call directly destructive of late capitalism is it, old man?” He smiled with false sweetness and slipped a condescending arm around my shoulder. I shook myself free.
    â€œIs that what art is to be measured by, its power of destruction? What about the giving of innocent pleasure, the struggle for form and mastery of technique – the purely aesthetic?”
    They fell about in simulated humorous collapse, slapped each other on the back, gasped for air, clutched at the table. The silent films, with their exaggerated gestures, were upon us.
    â€œTrue art,” he smirked as one imparting a sad lesson to a slow child, “is the expression of the will of the proletariat.”
    â€œBut, but …” I thought of my firm-chested peasants, my noble horny-handed sons of toil “… does not every line here speak of the dignity of labour, the integrity of the peasant?”
    His eyes blazed with anger. “Bourgeois false consciousness,” he snarled. Red spots of sale appeared in his cheeks. “The rural masses collaborating in their own exploitation?”
    I pointed to my own red spots. “Does it count for nothing that so many have been sold? You lot would give your right arm – arms – to sell like that.”
    Bakker, suddenly calm, regarded me with genuine pity. “Dear boy. The fact that so many people buy you is the clearest proof of all that, either you are no good, or you are being tragically misunderstood.” He pursed his lips to deliver oracular judgement. “My own view is that they understand you only too well.” He sneered. “Go on. Go back to your …” he camply lisped the word and did something showgirly with his legs “public”, making it obscene.
    I turned abruptly, eyes full of tears, only to cannon into something small and hard – a diminutive person, all in black with prominent teeth and hand outstretched, a sort of bucktoothed Toulouse Lautrec.
    â€œTidmans,” he sucked inspiration from the teeth, “ Telegraf .”
    Tidmans, the famous art-critic whose articles were like little polished jewels, collected to be published every year in book form. He was justly famous for his insight, his uncanny ability to go beyond the particular in