To get right to the novel, go to the start of the standard web-pages version, or to the contents, which has links to each chapter; or, especially if you intend to print it, go to the Acrobat version, which is a large file (1.1 megs; there is a 92 kb Acrobat sample if you wish to check that first).

All of these are freely available, which is why I am calling them, collectively, the Samizdat Edition, named for the Russian underground literature that circulated privately under the Soviet regime (though if you want to consider them shareware and send a contribution, I'd gratefully accept it); if you prefer a printed version, ask; there aren't many left.

(Searching for) Solid Ground is a novel about identity, with two main, converging plot-lines. One features Annie, who lives in Santa Cruz, CA, and in 1990 feels middle-aged and uncomfortable. The other concerns Blackie and Whitey, a pair of British hippie dope dealers who travel, one step ahead of the law and the mob, to Afghanistan in 1969. The stories are told in 90 short, alternating chapters, interspersed with occasional diversions and a third, flashback line.

Whitey is an almost silent half-Geordie, half-Cherokee who spent his youth in blues clubs. Blackie, his partner and lover, is a London School of Economics graduate and an obsessively rational talker. In Afghanistan they begin to learn from the examples they see something of what it is to be a person, but become entangled in schemes they only think they understand.

Annie is unsettled by the eerie resemblance between Bush's America and Nixon's, and inspired to join the political movement opposing the build-up to the Gulf War. She thinks her motives are an inchoate mixture of political, sexual and personal, as she discusses with a black gay gossip called Sebastian, but not with her partner, Brendan, for reasons that she does not fully understand. She decides to join a group planning to blockade the local Military Recruitment Center. Meanwhile, her conversations with Sebastian lead her to recall her youthful experiences in the hippie mecca of Goa, where she first achieved a comfortable understanding of who exactly she was during a Christmas full-moon acid beach party at Anjuna.

The book’s title arises from the image of an earthquake: Tensions build up that, if not released, lead inevitably to explosions; and yet people want to find a stability that is ultimately not only illusory but destructive. Santa Cruz was hit by a large temblor in 1989, and both Annie and Whitey suffer comparable psychological shocks.

The novel is also a celebration of hippie ideals, including the importance of play. It includes such minor delights as a recipe without numbers, a multi-lingual drama in only 26 words, three songs and sundry other diversions, most of which move the plot along. It places anti-establishment ideas in a context that demonstrates the long tradition of such humanistic values. It is written in high seriousness with plenty of low humor. To put it another way:

• moments of clarity under stress that enable people to change their own lives
• ancient hippies and modern luddites in the sixties and the nineties
• two strangers who carry each other’s satori and twice reveal it
• Santa Cruz, London, Kabul, Goa and places between
• acid insights sweetened with politics and hash
• 115,000 words
• done