The Towers of February

 

"A fourteen-year-old boy finds himself transported to another dimension and unable to remember his past."

I found this book in the school library in junior high school and was immediately captivated by it. I believe it must have been in ninth grade, because that spring happened a leap year (1980). This is significant because in the strange alternate reality into which the boy (Tom) was cast, February had 30 or 31 days. For fun, I decided that when March 1 arrived, I would date my papers as February 30, and I kept doing that through March, just adding additional days to February.

In many ways it felt as if it had been written just for me. I've never met anyone else who read this book. It slipped out of my memory after ninth grade and I didn't remember it until a few years ago, during a leap year, when the memory of it came back to me. 

It's very difficult to find a physical copy of the English translation. There is an Amazon page for it but no physical copies are available.  The review comments on Amazon are very similar to my own experience. "You'll never think 29th of februari just an ordinary date" (link). There is a digitalized copy on the Internet Archive.

I don't remember much of the story at all. The alternate reality was a not a dynamic and playful place like Narnia. Rather it was a bleak and cold, underpopulated and almost post-apocalyptic with brutalist buildings, the kind of utilitarian landscape that was built in both western and eastern Europe after World War II (the author was a Dutch woman who evidently wrote many similar stories). 

Looking back, I can say that the story captured a spiritual sensation I've had much of my life, that of being cast away from "real" reality and trapped in some kind of lonely, mostly empty dystopic sur-reality beyond ordinary time. I have had the feeling of needing to find my way back to the "real" reality, but also find other people in the dream reality and connect to them, to help bring them back too. This theme, a perception of the underlying dynamics of my life, keeps coming back to me in my life repeatedly. Last night I was thinking of this idea and the phrase "representational reality" popped into my head as a way of describing this general idea.

There are people I have met in my life who understand this, almost immediately and intuitively without my having to explain it, and there are others who, upon hearing it, would call this a form of mental illness. The latter type of person is far more common than the former, and I generally assume someone is in that category until proven otherwise. Only the people in the former category could truly become my friend and be allowed into my reality. It has always been that way. It is why I put my friends through a long rigorous process before I trust them, and after that I trust them utterly and completely, and treasure the friendship like life itself.

See this link for interesting commentary as well.

Also interesting comments here on Thriftbooks (where a copy is available for seventy bucks) with other recommendations of works by Drage.