The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban

Darkness roared with the lion, the night stalked with the silence of him.  The lion was.  Ignorant of non-existence he existed.  Ignorant of self he was a sunlit violence with calm joy at the centre of it, he was the violence of being-as-hunter constantly renewed in the devouring of non-being.  The wheel had been when he ran tawny on the plain, printing his motion on the grateful air.  He had died biting the wheel that went on and left him dead.  The wheel continued, the lion continued.  He was intact, diminished by nothing, increased by nothing, absolute.  He ate meat or he did not eat meat, was seen or unseen, known when there was knowledge of him, unknown when there was not.  But always he was.

Jachin-Boaz is a mapmaker.  He is talented and his maps are sought-after:

He would sell a young man a map that showed where a particular girl might be found at different hours of the day.  He sold husband maps and wife maps.  He sold vision-and-miracle maps to holy men, sickness-and-accident maps to physicians, money-and-jewel maps to thieves, and thief maps to the police.

He has been hard at work on his masterpiece, a map that shows where everything is that one could ever seek to find.  He gives it to his son, Boaz-Jachin, who seems disinterested in it.  Boaz-Jachin is skeptical that the map could show him everything he might seek.  Can it, for instance, show him where to find a lion, when lions have been extinct for years and years?

Boaz-Jachin's rejection of the map is difficult for his father, who suddenly abandons his family.  Jachin-Boaz moves from the Near East to what we might infer is London, where he gets a girlfriend and a job in a bookstore.  His son minds the store for a little while, but he too leaves, to find his father.  The motif of seeking and finding is obvious here, and the irony of the rejected map is sharp: the son has no map to find the father, and it's not clear what he's looking for when he seeks to find him anyway.  His motivation is at least partly anger, partly compulsion.  He wants to find his father so he can tell him--again?--that he doesn't want his map.  His need is the need of the son to reject the path the father lays out for him.

Before he leaves to find his father, Boaz-Jachin travels to the ruin of an ancient palace, now a tourist site--despite its antique themes and oracular style, the book seems to be set in contemporary times--to study a relief of a king hunting lions.  (The relief that inspired Hoban is one in the British Museum of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal.)  He's struck by one image, in particular, of a lion caught in the wheel of the king's chariot: the lion bites futilely at the wheel even as it brings him up to the king's spears to be murdered.  Boaz-Jachin traces the relief on paper, and then makes a succession of images, removing the spears, then the king, then the chariot.  He frees the lion, and it appears in London, where only his father can see it.  Jachin-Boaz tends to the spectral lion, feeds the meat, talks to it, is nearly clawed to death by it, but he cannot shake it.

In the image of the lion biting the wheel, Hoban finds a kind of symbol of reproduction and death.  Individuals die, but there is a life force that carries on in our children.  It's always the same force, Hoban seems to say, and we are only instantiations of it; our own deaths are difficult but by living we take part in something that extends forward and backward through all of time.  The lion is life--majestic and frightening--and though it bites at the wheel--angry and afraid--the wheel keeps turning. 

I've said before that Hoban seems to never write the same book twice.  But The Lion, his first novel for adults, establishes some of the stylistic hallmarks that I recognize in books like Kleinzeit and The Medusa Frequency: a style that imitates ancient literature applied to modern places and times, a love of inversions ("I have a lion.  I don't have a lion--a lion has me.  A lion hallucinates me."), a compulsion toward personification that reaches its sublimity in Kleinzeit.  If there's a reason The Lion satisfies less than those novels, I think it's because it takes itself a little too seriously; the absurdist humor of the later novels provides a counterweight to their mythishness.  The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz can be a little too pleased with its own turn of phrase.  But the novel is strange and frequently beautiful, and I found its meditation on life, death, and fatherhood to be pretty profound.  In it there are real dangers, real lions.