The Truth About Plum Lake

 

 

 

Under Plum Lake by Lionel Davidson is an intriguing book that is filled with ideas and theories beyond our time. “Under Plum Lake is a novel that from the first moment leads us, fascinated and convinced, into a world beyond our imaginings – a novel with the rare storytelling art, the emotional conviction, and the unforgettable voice of its own that characterizes a Lost Horizon or a Little Prince (dust jacket blurb, first edition).” In the beginning, the narrator, Barry Gordon, gives you little bits of information, compelling you to read on. Then he says he’ll get it clear. You learn that he is thirteen and is in his family’s summer house. He has two sisters, Sarah, who’s 17 and Annie, who’s 9, and he wants to find a supposedly long gone village’s lost treasure and looks at a cliff, swimming out in the sea, treading water near the rock face. He finds three caves and then swims back. The next time he swims out, he realizes that the caves are completely oval, and he has the feeling that someone is watching him but he doesn’t see anyone. He sees, swimming at high tide, that the bases of the cave project outward, looking-like platforms and seemingly intended for use as platforms. Beyond the first cave, there is a flat piece of rock that looks like a step and seems intended as a step. He begins to leave as it starts to rain and he almost drowns and gets caught and punished again by his parents.

One night, Barry sneaks out from his house and goes to the cliffs, trying to enter from above. He finds an entrance by breaking through a slate that’s disguised to look like the rock around it. He pulls out the slate and finds himself staring into a big hole. He has the sensation that he has to keep going even though he thinks he should leave, so he keeps going and he sees something floating in a hole. He finds himself looking at a boy that looks around the same age as him. Barry finds out that this kid’s name is Dido and Dido has white hair. Barry learns that Dido is from Egon and it isn’t in outer space but inner space. Dido says, “Inner space, Barry, there’s a world beneath this world. The real world. Egon.” Dido keeps touching Barry’s head and seems to be forcing Barry to do what he wants. Dido brings Barry to Egon and Barry learns that Dido is 99, his little sister is 60 and their baby sister is 18 years old.

There are many aspects to life in Egon that are different from ours: Barry asks Dido, “How does your sky stay up?” Isn’t air lighter than water? And isn’t Egon underwater? Our sky is part of the air. What is the thing Egonians live in? Is it air too? But water is not air. In Egon, the sun, moon, and stars shine. But do they have weather like rain and snow? Egon has the same animals and similar people. They have horses, cows, fish, and whales. They do have all the same things we have, like the same species and food, but they also have much more. They have Tigra trees the fruit of which is made into a delicious drink. They have stardew and many other things.

How about their vehicles: do they have the same designs and have the same parts like wheels, a steering wheel and pedals? No, their cars have no wheels because they use magnetic force. These vehicles go back and forward, up and down, and increase or decrease in speed. There is a speed limit not because of crashes (you can’t crash) but because of the force line. The distance between two cars is controlled when they are switched on.

This undersea world provokes so many questions from the reader: Is the magnetic force stronger near the core where the Egonians live? How big is Egon? Do they have laws, politics, or money for that matter? How do they construct buildings of such strange shapes (like a pineapple or a shell)? Where did all the new colors come from? “But it was like a carnival. Some of the buildings were like twists of striped candy; others like flowers or mushrooms. One had a pear-shaped dome, the color of a pearl.” How does everything glow in different colors? How does a building float in the air? How do you ride a rainbow over a moat with whales in it? Dido says, “It’s the finest city on the earth – the finest there’s ever been.” Dido’s dad runs the world. Dido says, “I know, I’m sorry. I should have told you. My father’s president of Egon. He runs the world. Welcome to the palace.” Egon’s culture is quite interesting – Dido and Barry go to many parties and Barry drinks Tigra and tries stardew. Tigra is a pure silver liquid with maroon stripes inside. The stripes move inside the drink. Dido informs Barry of the fact that Egonians live about seven times longer than humans. They don’t fight in Egon because they can’t feel pain so you can’t hurt each other. But if you hurt yourself very badly, you could die early. Egonians can pretty much do anything, play any instrument, do tricks, and compete like an Olympian, an artist, musician, or dancer.

Barry and Dido go to Plum Lake. Plum Lake is 12 miles long and 3 miles wide and surrounded with Ragusa plum trees. They say it’s the finest place on earth. People get to spend ten weeks in Plum Lake during their lifetimes. A week at Plum Lake is like three months anywhere else which is equivalent to two years and six months. One takes five-minute naps between activities, which equals a whole night’s sleep. But old people sleep longer. Old people can do all the same things as younger people can. They don’t get ill or move slowly. They’re live to be over 700. The only way that you can tell them apart is that they have no eyebrows and have thinner hair.

Everything is free at Plum Lake. You can eat where you want, do what you want. It takes up to an hour to eat a Ragusa which is a giant plum eight inches long and peeled like a banana. As you chew the fruit, the part you’ve bitten off grows back until it’s whole again. There’s a gas inside. You continue for sixty minutes and then gas goes and the Ragusa melts. Dido and Barry power ski at the power slopes, (it’s skiing but you have controls and can float off the ground); they power toboggan (similar to power skiing but in a toboggan); they visit the pleasure dromes (like a planetarium with seats surrounding a space in the middle but with no stage or screen), and then they went on kites, giant triangular kites with movable wings and controls.

Under Plum Lake is in-depth, provoking comparisons to human life. Do we multitask because of our relatively short lives? Strangely, we live longer than a lot of the species that live on land or water. We do not live the longest, but we are not placed in the same category as the animals that live shorter lives. The common housefly only lives about two weeks to a month! Nevertheless, the book addresses our lives, in relation to the longevity of the Egonians and the future. Their technology and ways of living are much more advanced.

Barry talks about how he saw the future and how marvelous and wonderful it was. He says, “You read stories and you see films. They show you the future, and it’s creepy. It’s a terrible future with frightening people and mad-looking places. And they’ve got it all wrong. I‘ve been there and it’s great. It’s a future full of fun. It’s supposed to be.”

There is no mention of any religion. There is only one mention of god when Barry asks if the giant mind is god. Dido says he hasn’t studied that yet, so there is a hint that the people study religion. Also Davidson makes clear that the people of Egon are still people, not another alien species to Barry. Many concepts in the book are still unexplored in our lives and could be eventually be discovered. For example, how do the cars float in the air? The kites glide using the wind and controls, but you can stop it in the air even though there’s gravity. At the power slopes, you can lift up into the air and switch power on and off. Also, when you get out of the pleasure dromes, you’re floating a little bit off the ground. The sun, moon and stars shine through the water, and the Egonians breathe in the water or whatever is down there. Or the way there is pretty much a lake inside a bigger lake, and the bigger lake is the ocean. And about the gravity, is the gravitational pull stronger than where we are? Dido says when people tried to move earth to a different place, the great stone brain split into different pieces, making the continents we know today. Was Egon somehow the only place in the world that was unaffected? And stretch mechanics: how does a car turn into plane or submarine? Dido says a piece of wood is a piece of wood simply because its atoms are arranged in a certain way. And if they were in a different pattern, it wouldn’t be a piece of wood anymore. Is this how stretch mechanics works? Do the atoms arrange themselves in a different way, changing entirely?

The way that moat could hold dozens of whales and the way you can ride a rainbow over a moat sounds completely fictional, but as Barry said, he has seen the future. I noticed that in the end, Dido does not say anything about returning to Barry’s time. He only talks about returning to Barry’s world. Does this mean that we live during the same time as the Egonains? Then there is the abyss. The abyss is a place of nothing. There is no air, gas, water, time or energy. But Dido says it is a holy place because all life came from it. When they arrive in the abyss, Dido tells Barry that he absolutely cannot see the world making itself, yet he wants to take Barry to the abyss because Dido wants to do something for Barry just to prove that he wouldn’t forget Barry and never would. He wanted to do something very special. Barry doesn’t know that he probably isn’t supposed to go to the abyss.

Dido says that the brain and the mind are two entirely different things. Everything has a brain, even trees do. He says that once you have the programs to work your brain, you grow your mind. And that basically, your mind is your life, so the bigger mind you have the more life you have. He says by the time your brain is shaped up, you are about 70 or 80 so people above don’t live long enough to grow the right kind of mind. He says that though minds are all different, brains are mostly the same. He said that the brain was programmed to minds and brains can’t do anything by themselves. Something I found particularly helpful was how he said, “The brain is just basic stuff. It’s like quartz or silicon that can be activated electrically; except what activated a brain is thought, which is faster.” Dido says that brains are controlled by minds and the earth is a brain but it is just a small cell in a bigger brain and the bigger brain was the universe. So therefore, there is a mind beyond the universe. He says, “Though the world is a complete brain, it is still only a cell in a bigger brain. The galaxy is a brain, too. It is one enormous whole brain, and works like one, controlling all the millions of worlds that made it up, but it is only still part of another brain. The universe is a brain. And it goes even further than that.”

Based on Dido’s insights, life formed in the ocean, and everything came from the ocean. We are made of water: three-quarters of our body is made of liquid. He says our blood, sweat, and tears are salty because the sea is. He says, “Everything came from the sea; everything started there and life on the globe was in just a thin skin round the edge, like the skin of an apple.” He says that the world was in three layers. That the outer one was the world of mountain dwellers that was so high up, there wasn’t much life. So it was the smallest and harshest layer. Dido says that below the first layer, there is the sea which has life in every part of it. He says that not only the sea has everything that’s above, it has more of everything. More life, more chemicals, minerals, more food, more oil, coal, gold… it has more of anything and everything. The foundation of the Earth, the crust, is the third layer. It is thicker than the first and second layer combined. I agree with this worldview. Life needs water and sunlight to survive and the ocean has both. Life lives in the water so the water won’t run out, and sunlight penetrates the water. But that raises another question: What about the life that lives in the deepest part of the ocean? There is barely any or no light there. Soon creatures create their own light though. Anyway, where we live, we live in air and receive sunlight directly. But water, we have to receive from rain, snow, or by drinking water or from foods that contain liquid. Life in the ocean gets water 24/7 because they live in it, and sunlight can penetrate the water. So Egonians seem to have more access to water and light.

My opinion is that this book is almost like a key to us. We probably have always thought about some of the things in this book but never really brought them to the surface. This book unleashes them all and gives us endless moments of pondering. We will always have a question about this book. No matter how many times we read it or how long we think about it, Under Plum Lake fills us with a sense of awe and wonder. We feel almost the way Barry did after experiencing Egon: filled with knowledge that’s ahead of our time.