Completing the Circle by Phi

We haven’t seen Phi for three years. This is his 49th solo Listener crossword and with shared setting he has compiled more than 50. Is that a record?

He presents us with a 15×11 carte blanche with the daunting word ‘asymmetric’ in the preamble. Bars needn’t be shown (but how glad I am that I entered them as they gave a clue about how to perform what followed): ‘Entering all answers will leave 22 cells blank, solvers must then rearrange the parts to form a rectangle with no blank cells’

No problem about Phi’s right to maintain his oenophile status. ‘Tight’ appeared in the very first clue, then ‘Top of can clutched, took a drink’ gave us CHUGGED and ‘Better to limit volume on a bender’ gave CURVED. Cheers, Phi!

Finding and understanding the 13 clues that were to give us FINNEGANS WAKE in initial clue letters was the challenge. An asymmetrical carte blanche might sometimes be accompanied by easy clues – but not here, with Phi’s high standards retained throughout. Thematically it all hung together really well since it meant that the wordplay in the special clues cycled two parts of the answer with Part 2 before Part 1, just like Joyce’s sentence (see below) and Phi’s grid, e.g. CHALONE is ALONE-CH and so on. E-TALON-GG / A-LIVED-A / VERD-R-I /DOO-NA-R / ASTEP / L-A-OL / TE-H-AR / AIR-ALIST / GEN (giving ENG) / RA-EN-TE / LEE-T-T / T-ADA. Yes, it was beautifully thematic but, like Finnegans Wake, hard going!

The other solutions flowed in but my attempts to fit them into the grid were disastrous until the penny-drop moment that it would work if I entered those answers going to and from a line of bars that would run down the centre of the grid and give us where to cut it and reconstitute it.

What about the very last clue. ‘Some time engaged by pair of admirers (3)’ It looked as though it had to be a hidden EEN (the other half of Dash confessed that he got hung up on that for some time) but it was cleverer than that. Put the pair of admirers together AdmirERAdmirer (yes, engage them!) and you get some time ERA. Setters are asked sometimes which is your favourite of your own clues? For example in Alan Connor’s series in the Guardian ‘Meet The Setter’ – We met Phi some years ago

Would Phi choose that clever little clue?

That line of bars down the centre of the grid was the prompt about how to simply cut the grid into two parts which neatly jigsawed into each other putting the ‘end’ before the ‘start’ just as James Joyce did in what is considered to be his most difficult work, Finnegans Wake. And, sure enough, there was the quotation to highlight.

Phi has done what Joyce did: put the end of his grid before the start, so that, in inverting them, we find that quotation ’14 words. 47 letters in parallel lengths from six to ten cells’.

Finnegans Wake opens in the middle of a sentence (“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs”) and closes similarly (“A way a lone a last a loved a long the”).

I’m sure other setters are left wondering where this compilation started – with the quotation? It is a very clever construction, thank you, Phi.