Over the Rainbow

There are great books, and books that aspire to greatness. There are books that are wantonly derivative, and others that are sadly, unconsciously so that attempt to leave a stamp upon time and immortalise the writer, yet like a small voice vanish into obscurity. There are books which leave no impression upon the mind, and others, a sense of the weary futility of life.

Over The Rainbow is none of these things.

Pickering creates a world within a world. His understanding of life as it is lived in Afghanistan transcends media reportage, or outraged commentary, or supposition. He has delved beneath the skin of a country and inhabited it; and in so doing has brought an astonishing depth of realism, of the pastiche of human emotion, to the war which the West views from their armchairs. His characters are believable, his writing sometimes simplistic yet stream-of-consciousness in the manner of Joyce, sometimes as vivid as Katherine Mansfield, sometimes as complex as D H Lawrence. (Indeed, one cannot help but feel that Lawrence's The Rainbow played a part in the formulation of this work.) Pickering does not hold back; he does not pander to sentiment, or spare his readers the reality of war. Yet, in so doing, he has made Over the Rainbow a work of art, tinted now by the pallette of the pointillist, delicate and surreal, even in death; and then with the pallette of the fauvist, bright and savage of hue, leaving indelible impressions upon the mind of light and shadow, blood and seed. He renders the brutality of life beautiful; and life itself a work of art, something to be savoured much as a gourmand delights in delicacies.