The Mouse Trap

This novella is meant to shock you and thereby save you from the monotony, boredom and death that is the fate of a mundane existence which we all suffer like some innocuous illness of the soul and mind. The story which emerges from a discussion between two old friends revolves around the memories they share of three people, Charles, Vera and Paula, who touched their lives in an unspeakable manner. While the narrator's story centres on a young teenage Lolita. The story also includes schoolyard narratives and schoolboy folk wisdom regarding strategy, tactics, manoeuvres, persuasion and the overall methodology for the guaranteed, successful and fool-proof gaining of access to physical intimacy with girls. The Mouse Trap involved the use of erotic romantic fiction to engage in metaphysical, political and philosophical reflections. In some respect, it is a response to Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and Reich's project on sexuality. It explores ideas and actions related to nihilism and anarchism. The Mouse Trap was meant to be a dystopian novel, possibly something like Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. However, it did not quite turn out that way. Nevertheless, the idea of nihilism especially as expressed in erotic teenage relationships became a theme I thought worthwhile exploring. Did boys with characters like Charles, Gavin and Thomas actually exist? Did girls with characters like Paula and Vera actually exist? Maybe they did! The Mouse Traps draws on memories of the views, opinions, values/morality and behaviour of teenage boys and girls when I was in high school. Is the universe causally closed? Is the Universe like a mouse trap. That is the fundamental question of this highly charged Novella which creates the illusion that the narrative is skating on the thin ice of common decency. In 'The Mouse Trap' the echoes of a nascent postmodernism begins to resonate in the emerging vision of teenage realities which begin to take shape on the desolate wastelands of the East Rand goldfields in South Africa. A nihilism inspired by a messianic vision of Naturalism and Physicalism mixed in with the influences of Lindsay Anderson's movie called 'IF…..' and the book 'A Clockwork Orange' by Anthony Burgess plays a significant role in shaping the perceptions of teenage schoolboys who in a spirit of anarchist rebellion embark on erotic adventures in which the parable of the charioteer of the soul in Plato's 'Phaedrus' finally finds voice once more after the passing of millennia.