Silent Radio

The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny is my favorite longer Lafferty work. One of its major ideas is silent radio, the drama that goes on inside us without being spoken or shown, yet somehow passes between us and enters the world we all share. Silent radio carries the ordinary richness of life, its pleasures, loves, and possibilities, but it also plays horrors that no one seems able to stop.

Sweeny thinks he composes his own inward programs. He finds other people receiving them and public history taking their shape. A major uncertainty in the novel is whether Sweeny has imagined what happened, remembered what he refuses to admit happened, or helped make it all happen by imagining it in the first place.

Everyone knows what it is to have a scene running in the mind. Sweeny discovers that the scene may have other inhabitants. When Sweeny helps another boy make more accurate snakes in the Age of Silent Radio, we begin to see how his contribution to an imaginative creation can make its horrors more dangerous. What this brought to mind tonight is that Enniscorthy's destructiveness is tied to a gift from his funny uncle: the Big Snake Book, which will tie to his great snakes, the Armageddon operas. This is some of the best horror in Lafferty.