There are many reasons to admire this recent work of the highly revered author, Mr. Deane. A Coven of Slippery Eels is novel that has no characters who are eels, at least no characters who utter dialogue. Though Mr. Deane is truly a master of metaphor he has never found it necessary to bless eels with a capacity for conversation. Lewis Carroll may do something similar, but Mr. Deane does not. For him, slippery eels are the elusive identities that we seek to retain but which slowly disappear. At times they rapidly vanish. But like the minds and ideas that John Locke saw as eternally perishing, Mr. Deane demonstrates with cynical compassion that humanity deceives itself when it refuses to recognise changes that irrevocably transform one's personality no matter how stubbornly we may cling onto some favourite aspects of ourselves. There is no enduring substance for any members of the coven of slippery eels, a truth that Mr. Deane conveys with patience and concern for those who may be on a similar path to destruction, torn as he is by senses of goodness and justice that cause him to write with such brilliant cynical compassion and saintly concern for the damned. Plato averred When the bonds by which the triangles of the marrow are united no longer hold, and are parted by the strain of existence, they in turn loosen the bonds of the soul, and she, obtaining a natural release, flies away with joy. But it need not be death that loosens these bonds of marrow and the soul might not be joyous at its release. However, unlike Plato, Mr. Deane has grasped how some persons may find virtue in corruption and evil. They do not seek the good or happiness or the virtues of justice, wisdom, temperance and fortitude. They delight in bias and corruption, spiced with black humour; they seek knowledge for the sake of power and revenge, but merrily, with jolly cruelty; they are only temperate when their appetites fail, but they can still giggle and cackle; they dare to do evil but only under a veil of secrecy and hypocrisy, while withdrawing into a cocoon of their own making, where they laugh at their own injustice. But they will forgive no wrong against them.Yet their cocoon is unravelling with age and approaching death for each generation that is bereft of male dynamism. The members of the coven of slippery eels ascribe to a pantheism of their own bizarrely amusing construction. They worship all gods and would-be gods in a bid to save themselves from the ire and jealousy of any particular deity. They are not even loyal to Satan. They do not value fidelity or loyalty, except from each other. Even the furious Erinyes cannot inspire them with dread. Instead they come to serve them. But as each generation becomes less dynamic, less vital, they become like a decadent parody of Thomas Mann's declining generations of Buddenbrooks. Mr. Deane's darkly comic Karayan clan may hope to save themselves from complete perishment by sorcery and an eclectic pantheon, but it is more likely the Erinyes will turn on them and wreak the revenge of all the gods. The apparent illusion of a caring environment in the old Turkish konat of the apparently civil, caring and compassionate Karayan women hides the incapacity of misandrist women to regenerate themselves. There barrenness extends to the other side of the world, to the other, to the American relatives who surrender to their control. These Americans embrace their corruption, willing to sacrifice their only source of phallic strength to the dark wickedness of a family that wallows in a collective memory of victimhood. This is a story in which there is no hope, but that is what makes it so hilariously entertaining. The jocular dialogue is borne out of a pervasive perversity as the less evil characters, and even the almost innocent ones slide down a slipper, eel-like path to eternal misery and darkness and spiritual suffering.