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The Great Lover – Michael Cisco

Posted by Tomcat on

The most significant problem I encountered with Michael Cisco’s newest book was that I kept having to explain to people that I wasn’t reading some kind of self-improvement sex guide for the amorously deviant.  I mean, it’s called The Great Lover, which, if it really were some variety of coital strategy guide, would be a laughably over-ambitious objective for the likes of me; but also – just look at that cover art! – it’s like a quasi-cubist, bi-gendered, demon-tongued, masturbating sex robot. Thing.  Reading it on the train – eyebrows were raised. Questions were asked. “No, it’s a novel – it’s really good; it’s not smutty”. Okay, so in places it might be a little smutty – but that’s ironic. I think.

The second most significant problem I encountered with Michael Cisco’s newest book is that it’s a book by Michael Cisco.  I don’t mean this as any kind of jab or derision – I think the man’s a genius – but being a book by Michael Cisco, The Great Lover carries all of his idiosyncratically voluble, stylistically arch, modernism-esque prose, which, in some places, can be incredibly abstract and difficult.  In a general sense, I found it more accessible than his last effort, The Narrator, but page-by-page there were many, many passages that left me very confused and disorientated, with no genuine sense of what the hell was happening.  It’s not that his idiolect is particularly avant-garde – I know all of the words he uses – but these words when put in this order become alter and alien and deracinated of their everyday meanings and contexts: there are just so many images!  I’m sure there’s an enormous narrative depth of reference and literary in-joke hidden among the cloying, hot dark of these abstract passages, but I’m nowhere near well-read enough to comment on what kinds of weird sub-sub-sub-genres of foreign existentialism have influenced The Great Lover. These occasional, long, opaque tangents test my analytical praxis and render it… useless.

Instead I chose to read these semantically obtuse sequences as mood pieces or tone poetry, passages in which Cisco’s “metered but unshaped words” work as emotionally-manipulative bombardments of imagery and metaphorscapes, supposedly with the intention of imbuing a feeling or mood rather than of moving the narrative forward.  It’s not frustrating or irritating in the least – it’s actually beautiful and dreamscapey, infused with Cisco’s characteristically gothic and horror-fiction-inspired language.  There’s a hypnotic tonality that’s more about sense than meaning. Indeed, such long, imagist sequences aren’t an arbitrary bringing-together of dissonant words: it’s obvious that Michael Cisco constructs his sentences with the delicate care of a neoclassical prosodist, and it really can be an incredible if ungraspable thing to read; frequently horrifying, undoubtedly grotesque, but also gentle and deliberately, beautifully rhythmic.  Some may accuse Cisco of disingenuously elevating tone at the expense of clarity, but ambiguity and unknowability permeate the story in ways that transcend its telling (more on this later).

Elsewhere, the regular (I should probably say “less strange”) prose is still highly stylised, in places completely lacking in any conjunctions or prepositions whatsoever – it’s always fascinating, and as Thomas Ligotti puts it “has an identity as much as any writer I’ve read:

She moves in foggy landscapes of primordial earth before life, walking from fog to fog.  Wherever she stops, the wings that hang all over her drop down and squirm together to form a throne, raising above her a dirty carapace made of the same waxy biological plastic of feathers, like a cloudy hood of fingernail.

He frisks her, as though he could find her life somewhere and put it back where it was.

He wakes with tears streaming down his face and into the grass. They never stop.

I know what you’re thinking though – what, if anything, is the book about?  Well, in plotting (if that word even applies) The Great Lover is an eccentric mix of hyper-original tableaux and characterisation, with frequent nods to well-established genre tropes from more conventional horror/urban fantasy/weird fiction.  These wry moments of reference to Frankenstein or Kafka or Orwell or Peake or whoever, while never veering too close to parody, help orientate the reader in what is an otherwise completely baffling and unfamiliar narrative landscape.  The Great Lover (/The Sewerman/The Demon/“Name”) is a resurrected corpse who spends his nights entering the sexual dreams of women he’s passed by in the street or on trains.  There’s definitely an unsettling, even ironic, disconnect between the protagonist’s name “The Great Lover” (whether it’s forced upon him or of his own devising is never made clear) and the relatively rapey, non-consenting nature of his sexual antics and the strange magic (erotomancy??) he performs to make them possible.  Either way, he’s soon approached by a strange sub-way dwelling cult who’re trying to bring into being some new Godhead, all the while fighting the brutal forces of ‘vampirism’ – here imagined as a kind of white noise of social conformity that chooses fascistic, upper-middle class students as its representatives (in the UK we might call them ‘Rahs’).  There’s more, lots more: the city of Sex, the Deep Sun and Hollow Earth, the Gnomes (so-named because the ‘know’); in fact, it’s almost impossible to précis the plot without simultaneously performing a sacrilegious disservice to its complexity and weirdness.  Man this book is hard to write about.

Most exotic among the novel’s dramatis personae, however, is the incredible, relentlessly strange ‘Prosthetic Libido’ (I think that’s meant to be him on the cover), a homunculus or golem assembled by The Great Lover to house the libido of a restless scientist.  The Prosthetic Libido is this cosmically tragic, permanently aroused yet perennially unfulfilled and childlike manifestation of the Freudian sex drive whose personality and dreadful circumstances can only be read as a kind of metaphor for love itself.  At one point the narrator announces, with more than a little wry sardonicism, “in all of literature there is no character more beautiful”. Counterpointing this is an equally strange creation, the Prosthetic Death; possibly the most terrifying, and definitely the most unusual thing I have ever encountered in a novel.  The creation of the Prosthetic Libido is one of the more lucid and definitely the longest passage of any clarity in the book; by contrast, all of the prose that surrounds and makes-up the Prosthetic Death is significantly more esoteric and slippery – a stylistic dualism that perhaps reflects the relative graspability of the two notions involved.

But reducing the novel in this way: sex//death, style//clarity, originality//pastiche is to massively oversimplify what’s going on, relegating the work to a straightforward exploration of binaries.  In reality, The Great Lover doesn’t exist in the extremes of these contrasts, but in the hinterlands between them.  It’s as much a narrative investigation of the problems of defining, well, anything – not least of all the nebulous and elastic relationships between author and character (the narrator constantly flits between first- and third-person registers); character and character; character and reader.  The book is immensely difficult and ambiguous, vague and demanding; the characters aren’t “Characters” – they’re too ill-defined; and the story isn’t plotted, but flows organically (an idea metaphorically echoed in the ever-shifting maps and train tracks – usually the most dependably solid of journeys – that dominate the imagery). And you, as reader, become something other: co-conspirator, maybe? Accomplice, definitely.  Michael Cisco’s style isn’t a shiny plastic coating around an ambiguous and non-descript capsule; his style is inextricably related to the novel’s aesthetic identity and philosophy.  The action, like all the best horror, transpires in the in-betweens: in sewers and dreams and on trains and through windows.

Hold that feeling of the story ending – of the life that you turn to when you put the story down starting to shine through it it is becoming transparent and to feel like a dream hold that feeling and stay in it. Just stay in it.

There’s so much I haven’t touched on; the humour is scatological, the action overly dramatic and aestheticised; the central love story is extraordinarily moving (even if Cisco couldn’t resist the urge to bombard his sightless heroine with the almost cruel aphorism ‘love is blind’) and the final chapter… well, don’t get me started.  The Great Lover is phenomenal – at one point I read for six hours without (and I’m well aware that I’m about to spurt a horrible cliché) noticing the time that passed.  You could let its twisted dark poetry wash over you, or you could (try to) wrestle it to the ground and into submission.  Either way, Cisco sticks a massive middle finger up to almost all of modern fiction by showing you that getting lost is far more worthwhile than finding your way.

Reading The Great Lover is like staring at the sun – it hurts, but it’s beautiful, and when you close your eyes afterwards, its image is still there.

Tomcat.

Details – China Miéville

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I’m still waiting on my copy of Railsea, so I’ve written something about one of China Miéville’s short stories, instead.

Details is characteristic of Miéville’s smorgasbording oeuvre: it’s a real grab-bag of genre tropes and influences; psychological thriller–meets–locked room mystery-meets–Lovecraftian cosmic horror.  And while you may be justifiably concerned that this kind of genre alchemy is better suited to the liberty and breathing room afforded by, say, the long form of a novel rather than Details’ meagre fifteen pages, the zaniness that comes with such a concentrated hodgepodge of genres is mitigated by a pleasingly restrained child narrator and a somewhat stylistically against-type adherence to the classic ‘three act structure’ of more traditional story-telling, both of which (narrator and structure) go some way to reining-in this potential for wackiness.

Although never medically defined as such, Details‘ primary concern is an elderly recluse, Mrs Miller, who suffers from what can only be described as a severe case of pereidolia – the propensity to seek out recognisable shapes (notably faces) in randomly arranged inanimate stuff and visual noise (clouds, tree branches, folded clothes etc. c.f. The ‘face of mars’).  Mrs Miller encounters the same unknowably nightmarish figure reaching forward to claim her in everything she sees – even the lines of her own palms.  Rather than blind herself (“taking the cowards’ way out”), Miller seals herself inside an empty, white-washed room and shrouds her body in unbending ‘plastic clothing’.  It’s fantastic fodder for a horror story, even if Miéville does disappoint by directly name-dropping ‘the Devil is in the details’ – the aphorism that so obviously informs the story’s premise that it would have been better left unsaid.  The narrative is delivered simply and matter-of-factly by the child narrator, a boy who passes food to Mrs Miller through a gap in the door.  But this utility of prose is charmingly counter-pointed by the story’s direct speech – which is obtuse and stylistically arch but never grammatically difficult – and I admit this satisfied my hankering for Miéville’s usually more alienating style:

“You imagine if I saw a field of wheat. Doesn’t even bear thinking about! A million million little bloody edges, a million lines.  You could make pictures of damn anything out of them, couldn’t you?

I’m wary of veering too close to spoilers, so I’ll leave the blurb at that (with a note that the dénouement is extraordinary).  There’s always a proneness to comedy or unintended farce in this kind of presentation of a potentially mad old woman screaming at her visitors, perhaps exacerbated by the media’s frequently patronising comic treatment of the same; but so bleak and precise is Miéville’s choice of words that Details, while skirting the edges of this trap, always manages to avoid falling into it.

Fundamentally (and this paragraph may say more about my own proclivities as a reader than Details as a whole), the story works as a metaphor for the interpretive pluralism of literary texts – the idea that it’s possible to produce many different readings of the same text is clearly echoed in the notion of pereidolia: all the shapes are there, it’s down to the reader to find whatever meaning and order they want.  Mrs Miller rants and raves about the shapes and alterities she can detect in everything around her, and it’s no stretch at all to apply this notion to theories of language in a way that really pushes the limits of structuralism.  This is especially true of written language, where text becomes very much a visual thing (how often have you squinted at a page looking for some kind of shape or pattern in the gaps between words?).  In this regard, Details isn’t unlike China Miéville’s recent novel Embassytown; the celebration of language that also makes quasi-terrifying points about its ambiguity.  Likewise, Details’ heavy symbolism surrounding doorways and boundaries definitely feels like a proto-The City and The City, a sort of finger-weaved knuckle crack before the main event.

That Details is rampantly ambiguous adds further weight to this argument.  Is the man desperate to access Mrs Miller’s room just a harmless drunk, or a determined agent of the cosmic nightmare she believes haunts her?  Mieville fans (me included) are more likely to believe in the reality of Mrs Miller’s monster than in the more urbane, psychologically sober alternative of her madness; but both perspectives (and others) are entirely and equally validated by the text. Mrs Miller’s white room contains everything you could want; Details is an exuberant if intimidating celebration of literary ambiguity.  Read it. Then read it again. Then a third time.

Tomcat.

I have Details in New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird ed. Paula Guran;  and also The Weird ed. Ann & Jeff Vandermeer – but it’s probably most easily found China Miéville’s short story collection Looking for Jake.

Unclay – T. F. Powys

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Generally speaking, I find that modern (well, in this case early 20th Century – but let’s not split hairs) attempts to appropriate or re-introduce or bastardise (or whatever) the medieval notion of the moralising allegorical characterology vary from incredibly irritating to down-right offensive (I’m looking at you Philip Roth (has anyone here actually read Everyman? (Roth’s novel, not the original play) – uurrrch, what a mess)).  By “allegorical characterology”, I mean all those personifications of moral abstracts that function as the literal protagonists of early medieval drama:- plays like the aforementioned Everyman or Wisdom or Mankind,  all populated by such “characters” as ‘Truth’ and ‘Felawshyp’, ‘Goodes’ and ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Kyndenesse’ etc.  Which is fine, I like medieval drama as much as the next.. er… dork; I mean, it inevitably results in some spectacularly unsubtle brick-to-the-face catechisms like “Everyman must forsake Pryde, for he deceyveth you in the ende” etc., but the intended function was evangelical and proselytizing rather than lyrical or poetic. Even today their value leans more towards the historically educative or curious than the literarily significant (and yup, I did have to read this stuff at university – can you tell?).

Anyway, as I was saying: attempts to introduce these types of personifications into modern fiction have a tendency to get on my nerves – not always, I’m not going to start bashing Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal or anything – but I often find them to be quaint, overly earnest historicisms rather than the revelatory and prophetical system-shocks that so many writers so obviously intend.

Just imagine my trepidation, then, when I opened T.F. Powys’ nearly-lost weird fiction curio Unclay only to discover that the lead is one Mr Death, a (or should that be ‘the’?) r(/R)eaper living in the quasi-fictitious rural village of Dodder.  Death has been sent to ‘Unclay’ (verb – a neologism but w/ obvious etymology) two of the village’s inhabitants, though finds himself unable to do so having lost the slip of parchment upon which the names of the unclayees are scribed.  Unsurprisingly, the narrative is peppered with such horrible wink-wink/nudge-nudge constructions as ‘Death is just around the corner’ or ‘with gladness they saw Death come’ (etc.), but given Powys’ elsewhere magnificent prose, it’d be somewhat harsh to attribute the clumsy and frankly boorish nature of such phrasings to any deficiency of his; rather, this ungainliness, lacking in both humour and depth, more likely exposes the weaknesses and inherent problems in this kind of personification as a narrative form than in Powys as a writer. But setting that aside as my own idiosyncratic problem with the genre, I quickly discovered that there’s a heck of a lot to like about Unclay.

Powys’ prose is a strange mix of aphoristic religious argot, abstracted dreamscape, grammatically non-standard expression and hallucinatory horror that calls to mind modern Dadaoist writers like Michael Cisco or Thomas Ligotti far more than any of Powys’ own 1930’s contemporaries.   Yet counterpointed against this arch and affected style is a lyrical romanticising of the rural and bucolic English countryside that’s almost Thomas Hardy-esque, both in its nature-heavy descriptions and its eagerness to present a countryside that’s at once beautiful and wild; sacrosanct and carnal.  And if that’s not weird enough for you, wait until you encounter the book’s supporting cast: a woman who thinks she’s a camel, a man who’s transferred his libido into a line of nut trees, and a priest who convinces women to become prostitutes, only to spend hours reading Jane Austen to them in an attempt to curtail their wickedness. I swear I’m not making this shit up.  Imagine Tess of the D’Urbervilles on acid, and you’ll get the picture:

As Joe Bridle bent over the pond, two dead corpses rose up but, when he thought he knew their sodden dead faces, the waters thickened and the faces vanished [...] When the wind grew still, other things happened, Horrid creatures – great pond beasts – newts and vipers, swarmed about him in the darkness. A year-old corpse crawled out of the water and clutched at the paper with foul dripping fingers.

Once settled in Dodder, Mr Death discovers sex in what is, essentially, a strange literalisation of the Thanatos meets Eros psychoanalytic paradigm. It’s (at last) a creative use of death as personification, as Powys externalises the death//sex desires by making his Mr Death sexually irresistible.  By having (almost) the entire cast sleep with Death at one point or another, Powys converges the sex drive with the death drive in what’s both a striking visual tableau and a blackly comic attempt at a literary proof of Freud’s most famous subconscious pairing.  Of course there’s more than a little ironic sardonicism in Death’s new found joi de vivre and sex addiction, but this kind of mischievous exploitation of ostensibly incongruent ideas is probably the best example I can use to sum-up the dark, goulish playfulness of Powys’ writing. There’s definitely some sympathy with the notion of Death as the cosmic jester, as epitomised in the medieval danse macabre aesthetic tradition; and if death vs. sex isn’t your particular brand of literary tote-bag, don’t fear – there’s a whole cardinal’s migraine of sinful/holy pairings being subjugated to Powys’ gallows-humour marriages of the disparate.

There’s also some dramatic irony at play: the reader knows that Susie, the significant object of Death’s affection, is the very person he has been sent to Unclay, and while this adds a trite level of predictability to the book, especially with regards to the you-can-see-it-coming-from-a-mile-away ending, the obviousness of the dénouement is essentially mitigated from any tedium because inevitability and fatalistic determinism (if not nihilism) are the very themes the book is all about. There’s a pleasing sense of closure as Powys simultaneously toys with and meets the reader’s expectations of the narrative in a way that mimics the teasing unpredictability yet ultimate inevitability of death (and Death).

As far as I can tell though, a lot of people’s negative reactions to the book have origins in T. F. Powys’ meandering, abstract and, let’s be honest, very difficult prose.  Everything I’ve mentioned above; the comic exploitation of BIG and SERIOUS ideas, is all undercut (though I think, also, augmented) by the achingly sad and obvious fact that Powys was a man plagued by deep religious conflict.  There are frequently long, tangential and inconsistent musings on the book’s themes and characters, as Powys performs exegesis on his own text in an attempt to settle his religious problems.  These often take the form of grand philosophical aphorisms or maxims, which are then only repudiated and thrown into question by more grand aphorisms and maxims later on.  Definitely Christian, it’s difficult, however, to parse any sense of an established orthodoxy. The kind of moral inconsistency that glorifies in comic representations of sex and marriage but expresses a shocking disgust and conservatism over, say, the notion of unbaptised babies makes Unclay a dramatically unstable and ungraspable book – which I think adds all the more to its beauty and depth, but could understandably be read as incredibly irritating.

I’ve probably not done Unclay justice, if only because it’s strikingly difficult to write briefly about without also performing an almost sacrilegious disservice to its complexity.  It’s at once beautiful and disgusting, open-minded but horrifically sexist.  There’s a sadness to be found in Powys’ brave and comic but ultimately unresolved wrestling with his own strange conception of religion and morality.  The danse macabre trips its steps all over the fields of Unclay, in all its inconsistent, cadaverously cackling jest.

Tomcat.

The Dissection – Georg Heym

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I’ve been reading lots of short stories. Here’s something I wrote about one of them:

It’s what’s inside, that counts.

The Dissection is thanatological prose poetry that subverts the expected praxis of autopsy, both in the non-scientific and almost lyrical timbre of its descriptions and in its metamorphoses of the blood and viscera that seeps forth from our cadaver protagonist.  Here a fracted skull leaks delicate memories of a long-ago summer liaison, and the real inquiry isn’t medical procedure or the cause of death, but the agony of undeclared love.  In synopsis The Dissection is more a tableau or vignette than any kind of graspable story: a group of surgeons slicing open a dead body is the extent of the narrative action.  Interrupting the unsympathetic and gory accounts of ‘putrid fluid’, ‘revolting work’ and ‘dissecting instruments’, however, is a brief internal monologue from the corpse; an achingly beautiful reminiscence of a youthful affair punctuated with the oft-repeated question ‘Should I say how I love you?’.  The surgeons are gaining access to his entrails in the literal rending of his body; but the dead man is likewise performing a figurative ‘opening up’ to the reader: exposing his more cherished innards through this outpouring of sentiment.  This might sound twee, even banal and saccharine, but there’s a playful exuberance in Heym’s literalisation of the well-established cliché of buried love that belies any suggestion of trite romanticism.

The Dissection is short and in equal parts obdurately robust and quiveringly fragile, but this juxtaposition between the lexicons of pathology and of love isn’t as jarring as you might expect.  Tempering the transition from gory action to poetic memory is a through-line of synaesthetic imagery that sees the dripping of red blood transposed to an evening poppy field and a red dress that ‘billowed around your ankles as a wave of fire in the setting sun’.  Similarly, this sun fades to a lantern, is supplanted by candles and an eventual return to the morgue and the light reflecting from the doctors’ ‘irons chisels’; it’s satisfyingly cyclical in a way that challenges the finality of death, or at least the transience of love and memory.  Tonally it wallows heavily in love and exalts in lucid fetish at the decaying body.

But this ambiguity between the balance of devotion and loss is kinda symptomatic of the story’s length: it’s tiny – all that lies on this autopsy table are love, death and words, deracinated of any biography or knowable context.  The reader has to perform exegesis to get at what’s inside the text, just as the surgeons must apply their scalpels to access the body.  It’s tempting therefore to paste some history of our own invention over the narrative in an attempt to find some cohesion or resolution; but in conducting our investigation so, we are fundamentally changing the subject himself, which only proves to make more unstable an already vague and faint work. So if there is any theme or message functioning within the story, it’s probably the age-old scientific conundrum that you can’t observe anything without changing it, but we can’t know anything without observing. In hackneyed terms, you could say something naff about the reader as surgeon, but this isn’t really a coroner’s exam – and The Dissection, for all its examination of bodily death, is very much alive and revelatory.  It tears at the end of love and the beginnings of death, but also the deathlessness of memory and the brevity of the physical body.

The Dissection is a masterpiece, at once sickeningly grotesque in a manner suggestive of the most visceral gothic horror, while also heartbreakingly beautiful, embracing a stylised lyricism that calls to mind the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.  It’s horror meets romance in the least cliché and expected way possible, and makes a soliloquy out of dissection.  There’s a final suggestion that the lifeless face manages a small smile, but whether beautiful memory has briefly re-animated the corpse, or whether the work and tugging of the surgeons has stretched the skin into the illusion of a rictal grimace is left to the caprice of the reader.  I opted for the former.

Tomcat.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar – Eric Carle

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The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a phantasmagoric bodyshock horror story that focuses on the tenets of extreme gluttony and one creature’s psycho-compulsive desire to consume the world around him.  Taking cues from Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s conception of horror isn’t a hyperbolic focus on blood and viscera, nor is it concerned with gothic notions of ghosts or death: rather, the anathema is an internalised grotesque; it is the body itself that is to be feared, treacherous from the inside and predisposed to intense bloating, mutation and the eventual emergence of the literal monster from within. 

Whether or not the titular (yet never-named) Caterpillar’s gluttony is caused by some form of substance withdrawal, early childhood trauma, psychosis or hormonal imbalance is never made clear, as Eric Carle’s sparse and deliberately minimalist prose refuses to satisfy us with any kind of biography or context.  I guess it’s down to the caprice of the individual reader whether or not the hubristic protagonist is eating to compensate for some tragic loss or unhappiness, or whether the book functions as a more simplistic parable and warning against greed as a moral vice.  You could even read the work as a capitalist allegory; a sarcastic metaphor that criticises consumerist living and the compulsion to relentlessly use up even that which we don’t need.  At about mid-way through the narrative, for example, the Caterpillar abandons the apples and foliage of his natural diet and turns instead to increasingly unsuitable and unnecessary processed foodstuffs: cakes, ice-cream, chocolates etc; he doesn’t need these things, but he is nonetheless beset with the urge to consume them, resulting in an inevitable sickness that can be only read as a kind of moral malady and existential ennui in the face of so much needless feeding of the self, something with which – in the current business environment of in-your-face marketing and the suggestion that an exponential increases in what we buy is the only path to happiness – I think we can all identify.

Eric Carle’s familiar illustrative style is here made noxious with a gross high-contrast palette of juxtaposed reds and greens that might function as trippy visual call-back to hallucinatory substance abuse, perhaps hinting at the protagonist’s hidden and difficult past.  The cut-and-paste nature of the art is reminiscent of Max Ernst, the early Twentieth-Century master of visionary Dada collage.  What is most striking about The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s aesthetic, however, is the white and formless void in which the narrative action transpires.  Whether this is a visual metaphor for the emptiness of the Caterpillar’s existence, or a literal representation of the world after it has been entirely devoured by our protagonist is never made clear – it could even be a psychologically sympathetic reflection of the Caterpillar’s own solipsism: all he sees, all that has meaning to him, is food and the self.  In a highly creative manipulation of the book as a physical ‘artefact’, several pages have been punched-through with holes, providing the reader with a teasing glimpse at what’s coming next, which not only lends great pace and momentum to the work, but also provides us with a taste of the Caterpillar’s own mental state (and, indeed, the mental state of any addict) – always looking forward for the next meal, the next hit and the next and the next; wondering where it’s going to come from.

The formless white void inhabited by "The Caterpillar".

Most shocking, however, is the book’s horrific dénouement in which (spoilers ahead…) the Caterpillar descends into a life of abject reclusion, shutting himself away for an undisclosed period of time before an act of eclosion which sees an entirely different creature emerge from the now empty shell of our hero’s grossly disproportionate and outsized body.  There is some debate, as lepidopterists will tell you, over whether the emergent insect (the “butterfly”) is, in fact, an altogether separate species of animal from the crawling, wingless original.  If this is the case, then the Butterfly could be read as a monstrous and parasitic ‘other’, hijacking our helpless protagonist from within and enforcing upon him a set of behavioural patterns beneficial to the waiting monster, but not the hero, namely: the aforementioned propensity for extreme greed, reinforcing The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s identity as a work of terror, in line with such classic horror staples as demonic possession or parasitic alien gestation.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is bildungsroman tragedy told via a pastiche of horror fiction mores and an unsettling convergence of disparate genre conventions: prose poem meets phantasmagoric dreamscape meets an examination of chronic loneliness, all fused with the suggestion of a loss so deep and painful that even when the hero devours the world until it is reduced to an empty white nothingness, the suffering remains.  Perhaps the inescapable punched-out fissures in the book’s pages expose The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s real subject and message, the core of hurt that persist through everything: the holes that can’t be filled.

Tomcat.

Cold Hand in Mine – Robert Aickman

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I think it’s unfortunate that when met with the notion of ‘The Weird’ as genre, most people will kinda stare blankly or shrug their shoulders.  A few might be able to roll off the names of the more familiar and better-known progenitors: F. Marion Crawford, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft or T.F. Powys; a few more will know and have read the heavy-hitters of the modern revivalism (the so-called ‘New Weird’): Miéville, VanderMeer, Michael Cisco, Thomas Ligotti etc. But the real empty shelf in the stacks of readers’ minds is the inter space between The Weird’s abounding inception and its recent popular revival.  Even the word ‘revival’ is somewhat of a misdirect, suggesting if not a death then at least a falling to unconsciousness or lethargy, when in fact the genre was very much alive and pumping its beautifully disgusting blood all over the 20th Century.  One such writer from this nearly lost mid-period of The Weird is Robert Aickman, the British master of the weird short horror story.  Infuriatingly he’s pretty much out of print these days, but his seminal collection Cold Hand in Mine is available via the print on demand Faber Finds series.

Aickman’s stylistic proclivities are in line with the aforementioned Blackwood and Lovecraft – (and more recently Ligotti owes Aickman a debt) – in that his stories are characterised by a wanton sense of ambiguity and a frequent refusal to provide the reader with any kind of closure or resolution.  It’s telling that Cold Hand in Mine quotes in epigraph Sacheverell Sitwell, “In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation”, and I took this as a useful heuristic when faced with the frustration of an abruptly ended story or the never-arrival of a long-teased denouement.  ‘The Swords’, for example, opens with the sexually suggestive question “My first experience?” and a short biography from the narrator that baits the reader into expecting an entirely conventional loss of virginity bildungsroman. What follows, however, is a journey to that staple locale of so many classic horror stories: the out-of-the-way mist-shrouded town, and an encounter with a strange kind of theatre in which a woman is repeatedly stabbed by members of the audience – (coming to no apparent harm) – before being sold as prostitute to our narrator and literally falling to pieces during the sex act.  It’s tempting to paste some hackneyed psychoanalytical significance onto the repeated stabbing of the woman, and the sexual metaphor of swords as phallic substitute is perhaps a little too in-your-face; but fundamentally this is a narrative that demands reader-input and analysis if it’s to make any kind of sense.  The language of performance coupled with the theatre sequence definitely casts the reader in the role of scopophiliac audience member, consigning all sex scenes to acts of inherent voyeurism with the reader as the third party onlooker.  The sense of horror is thus created when the act of reading is equated with passive observation, suggesting that you, as just another audience member, are, by continuing to read, somehow complicit in the mass on-stage rape of this woman.  Furthermore, the woman’s gross disintegration under the inexperienced thrusting of our protagonist can be read as either i) non-literal nightmare manifestation of his sexual anxieties and naivety; ii) a heartbreaking metaphor for the psychological disconnection the prostitute has to make during sex between her inner self and her physical body: a kind of mind//body separation that functions as self-preservation; or iii) a telling moment of tragic revelation in which the prostitute’s apparent immunity to the on-stage stabbing is finally broken down and her true pain revealed: her on-stage and back-stage personas being not so different, after all.  The ‘death of innocence’ so often explored in works of sexual initiation is here coupled with a much more bleak and literal examination of death.

But not all of Cold Hand in Mine’s stories are so analytically yielding.  It’s anybody’s guess what strange combination of folk tale, ghostlore and German mythology have gone into creating ‘Niemandswasser’, in which a reclusive and suicidal German lord wrestles with doppelgangers, sibling rivalry and a strange correlation of literal topographic borders with the finer internal boundaries between mental balance and madness: a kind of horror that ties humanity to nature not in a way that’s organic and beautiful, but in a manner which exposes man to all of nature’s violent vagaries, inconsistencies and dangers.  Elsewhere, ‘The Real Road to the Church’ sees a demonic and otherworldly funeral procession pass through the garden of protagonist Rosa’s new island home, coupled with an almost Socratic exchange between Rosa and a retired priest that’s peppered with unnervingly personal and quasi-romantic non-sequiturs, “I can hear the beating of your heart”.  Precisely what’s going in is difficult to pin down, but that’s entirely the point: the stories of The Weird function at their highest when they transcend the everyday and the predictable, even rendering the language of exegesis imprecise and unhelpful.  The more I tried to dig out these stories’ foundations, the more I felt like I was just piling stuff on top of them.

It’s probably somewhat ironic, then, that the most disappointing stories of Cold Hand in Mine are those that offer the comfort and succour of logical explanation.  When, for instance, the vampire in ‘Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal’ is revealed to be just that: a vampire, I couldn’t help but feel deflated.  Before Aickman’s ‘big reveal’, the vampire could have been anything; the ultimate revelation is a massive letdown in the face of the story’s brilliant lexical pastiche of Jane Austen-esque romance, which would have benefited from a much more avant-garde supernaturalism.  What we get instead is a fairly run-of-the-mill, period vampire romance.  If The Weird has an agenda to horrify with the suggestion of an unknowable other, it fails itself when resorting to specificity and explanation; that which is sensible cannot be Weird.

And that’s really the crux of it.  Robert Aickman’s best stories are not yours, not mine; they’re not even his, because when it hits its stride, Cold Hand in Mine is so unknowably strange and tenebrously cryptic that the reader is almost too scared to look deeper: the suggestion is that the truth of these tales is even more horrific than their mysteries.  So it’s never the narrator who is uninformed, nor the by-standing secondary characters, nor the landscapes themselves: it’s the reader who is exterior. The paranormal hysteria generated by the almost-living steampunk-esque time pieces in ‘The Clock Watcher’ makes perfect sense to Ursula, likewise the titular protagonist of ‘Meeting Mr Millar’ knows exactly what strange things go on in his offices.  Cold Hand in Mine is successful because it doesn’t show something ‘other’ to the reader, instead it makes something ‘other’ out of the reader; the reader is on the outside: and what could be more strange, horrific or, indeed, Weird than realising that it’s not the world or it’s people that’re mad: it’s you.

Tomcat.

In Soviet Russia, Books Review You

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Tintin in the Land of the Soviets

Spurred on by constant encouragement/recommendations(/nagging) from my friend Thom (all well meant, of course), I’ve recently ‘gotten into’ comics and graphic novels.  It’s taken me a while, sure, but this is mostly due to [misguided comment about comics no.1::] my latent fear of any book that so stringently directs your visual conception of its narrative as to actually have some guy(or guyess) draw you a picture of what’s happening in every single scene, the very notion of which I used to find irritatingly prescriptive in a kind of, like, here’s-what-to-read-and-what-to-see-and-you-will-have-no-say-in-the-matter way.  But after a concerted effort to get over myself and recourse to frequent memorandums telling me that comics are actually different from novels (no really, they are), I’ve found myself genuinely enjoying the medium.  My most notable [misguided comment about comics no.2::] comicular (that’s the adjective, right?) favourites thus far being: Warren Ellis’ Planetary, Grant Morrisons’ Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, some Scott Pilgrim, some Phonogram and various and sundry DC/Marvel back-issues I’ve dipped in and out of. Of which in and out I have dipped.

I’ve held back from reviewing a comic until now, however, chiefly out of an anxiety that I lack the requisite artistic experience/knowledge to adequately critique what is foremost a visual medium, and worried that I don’t possess or understand the language of the visual signifier enough to make any headway into writing a review that’s at all engaging or insightful, or interesting. Or readable.  That anxiety’s still here, in buckets, but it seems apropos that just as I got over my fear of reading comics lest I find myself unable to engage with the form, I should likewise get over my fear of reviewing the same.  So I’ve chosen for my first (adjective used optimistically) comic review Tintin in the Land of the Soviets – this for various reasons: I’ve often heard the likes of Tom McCarthy and China Miéville extolling the narrative depth and exegetic fruitfulness of Tintin’s adventures, and so perhaps Hergé’s books offer a relatively gentle “way-in” for a first time reviewer such as me. But principally I chose Tintin so I can avoid the potential (?) reviewerly faux pas of giving more credence to the writer than the artist, or the artist than the colourer, or the colourer than (more leftfield) the letterer etc. as polymath Hergé has all four bases covered himself.

It’s tempting to begin a review of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets by lambasting its racist and clichéd portrayal of Soviet Russia; its patronising belittlement of Russian cultural achievements (“By Trotsky!” being the favourite native curse); its cast of offensively reductive, bearded, vodka-drinking Soviet stereotypes who converse in a ubiquitous cod-Marxist drivel talk (expect to read the word ‘Bourgeois’ over and over) and the sort of gross way it portrays Communists as not just politically dangerous and deceitful, but as intrinsically evil in every way (drowning dogs for the hell of it, etc.).  But to claim the moral high ground in this way you’d have to ignore the entire textual provenance of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets as well as its convoluted post-publication history.  Hergé, who working as a freelance pencil-for-hire was commissioned to compose the piece in 1929 as an anti-Communist educational guide for children, very quickly distanced himself from the work and frequently lamented its “political naivety”, even refusing to ink the book when, later in life, his publishers asked him to colour all of his early b&w strips.  In some ways Tintin in the Land of the Soviets does represent the worst that comics has to offer – a propaganda piece cynically targeted at children with an agenda to engender both jingoism and xenophobia via fear-mongering, stereotyping and hearsay – but it’s nonetheless a charming and frequently funny story that functions as early document of the comic as longform medium.

But as well as being an early example of comic working as sustained narrative, TITLOTS (whoa… this is one book I probably shouldn’t shorten to acronym…) Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is very much a proto-Tintin: the eponymous protagonist doesn’t even look like himself: he’s beefier, longer-nosed and his characteristic There’s Something About Mary-inspiring quiff is barely noticeable.  Similarly the 2D, side-on perspective and uniformity of both panel size and layout offers no suggestion of the formal experimentation and artistic creativity that Tintin’s later adventures embody; aside, that is, for the occasional deviation to a kind of quasi-isometric camera angle and the functional ‘blacked out’ panel that indicates darkness.  Also: Snowy talks in almost every panel – offering glib and sarcastic comments on events.  There’s a Stewie Griffin-esque ‘can the other characters understand him?’ quandary that the reader has to deal with, and I opted for ‘no’, which elevates Snowy’s musings to the level of extradiegetic commentary – outside of the narrative and addressed to the reader – Snowy voices concerns over the incoherency of the plot and Tintin’s propensity for encountering danger while also making the kind of pithy observations that can only be read as author self-insertion, as  Hergé wrestling with the less-than-wholesome vagaries of the politically loaded commission.

The predominant thematic focus, such as it is, is disguise: and whether it’s Tintin’s conveniently stumbling around the back of a Soviet factory to discover a Hollywood-esque set of wooden facades and sound-effects masquerading as successful industrialism (a foil to convince Western Europe of Russian technical might), or Tintin’s own constant employment of ever more ludicrous costumes (a soldier, a Bolshevik, a ghost etc. – the latter conceived to expose the stupidity of the Russians who’re all terrified), disguise is always the ironic means by which deeper truths are uncovered – on both a physical level (Tintin’s soldier bluff grants him access to a secret Soviet meeting) and metaphoric  (for e.g: the Soviet cover-up of the dearth of grain acts as metonymy for their lack of basic morality).  The Soviets’ use of deceit is implicitly tricksy and sinister – used to obscure the horrible truth of their regime – whereas Tintin’s disguise is set up in direct moral dichotomy to this: his tricks expose truth, theirs obscure it – a relationship clearly engineered to carry larger, real-world parallels with the political acts of the characters’ respective nations.

But even using the word ‘characters’ is somewhat of a miscall: Tintin has definite journalistic clout, and Snowy is charmingly aloof – but Tintin in the Land of the Soviets’ supporting cast of generic, un-memorable [misguided comment about comics no.3::] sprites is just another (visual) incarnation of the theme of guising: the soviets are all the same – not characters in any artistic or writerly way, but homunculi for the easy expression of Hergé’s political stereotypes.  It’s best to think of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets as a comic awash with the inauthentic: politically, visually and more literally in terms of plotting, costume and speech: the Soviets even like to spell out to one another their “evil” foreign policy plans and freely admit to their enormous political flaws in a manner utterly inconsistent with naturalistic dialogue.

It’s perfectly fitting that a comic Hergé would come to regard as false and not true to himself is so preoccupied with mistaken identity and cover-up.  For what it’s worth, I enjoyed reading it immensely, even if this enjoyment was coupled with a kind of moral trepidation at the comic’s overt agenda in a way that made me question my own readerly sensitivities.  But that’s my first ever comic review just about done and dusted. If people like it I may well review the second Tintin adventure next month; after all, there’s no way that it can possibly more controversial than Tintin in the Land of the Soviets… right?

Tomcat.

Inherent Vice – Thomas Pynchon

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If anybody tries to tell you that Inherent Vice is “Pynchon-lite” or a good “way in” to his unforgivably dense and complex early books, don’t believe them.  It’s not that Inherent Vice isn’t light-hearted or readable or particularly insouciant, it’s just that: it’s not really Pynchon. I can’t recommend it as any kind of gateway novel to the harder stuff of Gravity’s Rainbow or Mason & Dixon (or whatever), simply because it carries none of the postmodernist leanings, esoteric vocabulary or anti-structural abandon that so pervades those earlier works.  I can, however, recommend Inherent Vice as one of the better examples of the hardboiled revivalism that’s currently so modish and en vogue.  Usual comparative touchstones for reviewers of Pynchon are the higher echelons of the modernist cannon – you know, all those extremely long and opaque novels rampant with metaphysical concerns (Joyce, Kafka, Forster, Wyndham Lewis et al and etc.) – but the genre brothers of Inherent Vice are strikingly more low-brow, even pulpy (a term I use without prejudice): Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Elmore Leonard.  The significant point of difference being that Pynchon re-appropriates the stylistic and aesthetic mores of noir fiction that saw their hay day in the late twenties/early thirties and sets his novel instead in 1969. All of the narrative hallmarks of the hardboiled remain intact; the cold and apathetic portrayal of hard violence, the playing-it-fast-and-loose-with-the-law/whatever-it-takes approach to solving ‘the case’ and the iniquitous relationship between the police and certain individuals: but here they’re augmented by contemporary 1960/70s issues: recreational drug use, a free and easy approach to sex, bad haircuts and, er, surf rock.

Inherent Vice entails a characteristic hardboiled plot that’s so convoluted and tricksy as to make the act of précis fundamentally reductive and unhelpful.  Furthermore, and requisite of the book’s enormous cast, I had to maintain a system map of characters and their relative relationships (see my scan below) as an aide-memoire for reference during reading.  I also worry that giving a convoluted blurb will destabilize the fine tightrope that Inherent Vice walks between homage and pastiche by impressing on you good readers a sense that the book is either i) entirely parody or ii) the opposite: utterly serious; and I wouldn’t want to give the impression that the narrative leans heavier to one side than the other, so masterfully balanced is Pynchon’s prose. Very briefly then: Doc Sportello is an L.A. P.I. inconveniently tasked with several simultaneous missing persons cases, one of which forces him to abandon the ideal disconnect between his work and personal life coming, as it does, at the behest of his ex-girlfriend.  Predictably, all the cases are soon revealed to be eerily interconnected.  Oh, and Doc’s also a massive stoner.

This isn't even the entire cast...

I’ve always had a critical blind spot when it comes to noir; the private-eye-as-social-outlier trope, functioning beyond the law yet ironically working to uphold its vagaries, appeals to me on some level that transcends the technical flaws or problems any given work within the genre might possess. Yet for all its preoccupation with the ‘cool’ of neo-noir, Inherent Vice is equally concerned with the ironies and moral inconsistencies of the genre. There’s a definite tension between the ad hoc, casual hipness of recreational drug use, and the darker truth that such substance abuse offers a mode of escape from the genuine emotional damage that bubbles under the surface of almost every character.  While it’s a blast to read about Doc’s frantic traversal of L.A. as he fumbles his way through various and sundry meetings with contacts and suspects, carried forward more by the impetus of luck and weed than any genuine investigative clout, there’s always an underlying sense of comic pathos due to his “doper’s memory” and the prevailing suggestion that behind his hardboiled, womanising and violent-cool exterior lie the more significant character traits of chronic loneliness, addiction and self-doubt. Beneath every quip, one-liner or somehow hilarious bad pun (Pynchon’s penchant for those remains intact) is Doc’s inveterate concern over where his next hit’s gonna come from.  Inherent Vice marries farce and fun with a nonetheless ubiquitous sense of buried pain and existential despair that permeates the period: drug-fuelled car chases, comic banter with the ‘acid guru’ and constant casual sex occur in scenes deliberately contrived to highlight the emptiness and transience of such encounters, but in such a subtle way that it’s left to the reader whether or not you engage with this narrative depth, or merely read the novel for the bonkers crime caper it is on the surface.  Thus Pynchon forces the same choices upon both reader and characters alike: bury the emotional pain, or set it in opposition to all the psychedelic campness, and thereby potentially expose the wild, neon-lit fun as the shallow cover-up for despair and lack of direction that it maybe, maybe was all along.  That’s not to say that Pynchon denigrates or maligns the sixties/seventies; he’s clearly enamoured and much in love with the decades of his youth, as made clear by his meticulous attention to the details of fashions, pop-culture, language etc. The onus of the story is ‘the sixties were free, fun and amazing’ the subtext says ‘but we’d be foolish to want it back’.  It’s a lament, more than a love letter.

As you’d expect, Inherent Vice is exceptionally well written, if somewhat of a culture shock in comparison with its more bombastic forebears. Long compound-complex sentences are still the grammatical standard, but here the technical esoterica of Pynchon’s earlier novels is substituted for the slang and cant argot of the sixties’ L.A. idiolect, so expect to read lots of ‘groovies’ and ‘bummers’ along the way; a few too many, in places.  Pynchon also brings forward his lively preoccupation with reproducing song lyrics, this time from the aforementioned surf rock genre. And while this works well in his earlier novels when counterpointed against his other, high culture concerns, here it falls flat: unmitigated by any austere contradictions or oppositions, the constant barrage of bad lyrics is just a bit naff, easily skipped and of mostly nostalgic significance.  The homage to noir also leans dangerously close to cliché in places, never more so than when Doc begins one of his long, clearly well-rehearsed speeches about how much he hates ‘The Man’; a flaw mirrored in its tedium by straight-edged cop Bigfoot’s parallel rants on the subject of hippy hating, and how they all need to “get a haircut”.

But let’s not end on a low note.  Inherent Vice is, above all, just ridiculously good fun.  Sure it’s been somewhat mis-sold as nothing more than a frivolous and psychedelic private eye escapade; there’s definitely more to it than that; but the novel’s ironic handling of genre conventions and its moral examination of 1960s’ social attitudes are threads that’re im- rather than ex-plicit.  If you’re just after a frequently hilarious, convoluted but ultimately satisfying hardboiled crime adventure, then go for it; after all, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Tomcat

Letter to My First Love

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Okay so this is cool.

My friend Carly who works for the San Francisco Ballet (hey, don’t look at me like that – I have cultured friends!), is putting together a characteristically creative and somewhat avant-garde promotional campaign for the up-coming ballet Onegin.  It (the promotion) entails a tumblr feed composed entirely of love letters submitted anonymously by members of the public taking the subject ‘letter to my first love’.  The onus isn’t on the reproduction of actual letters, however, it’s more like: ‘if you could write a letter to your first love, what would you say?’

You can find the promotion here (SFballet.tumblr.com), and while some of the submissions are inevitably a bit cringeworthy and naff, many others are very sweet, even moving.  Several of the letters lean heavily to the comedic (one in particular I find very funny), but more-often-than-not the tone is of clearly genuine feeling and sentiment. I’m man enough to admit that the general standard of writing is much, much higher than I initially anticipated, and some of the letters scan almost like prose poetry, unafraid to leave behind the expected propensity for romanticism and explore, instead, such heavy themes as death, regret and the pathos of chronic lonliness.  It’s powerful stuff.

It’d be great if you could head over there and take a look at the letters people have written, and even better if you submit your own (letters addressed to inanimate objects, songs, T.V. characters, long departed pets or that issue of Sonic the Comic no.1 your Mum unwittingly binned while you were at school that one time (…) are also acceptable (remember, it’s all anonymous)).  Carly’s championed my blog for ages (ardent readers of Tomcat in the Red Room (…if such people exist…ahem…) might remember a review of The Easter Parade Carly was kind enough to write for me last year) –so I’d love for Red Room readers to return the favour by whipping up some support for this.  I can’t offer much incentive other than a guarantee that you’ll be contributing to something genuinely worthwhile – think of it as crowdsourced poetry; very twenty-o-twelve.

Tomcat.

Big Machine – Victor Lavalle

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On the Venn diagram of the New Weird, Victor Lavalle’s Big Machine sits round about where the circles of Michael Cisco and Neil Gaiman overlap those of Thomas Ligotti, Haruki Murakami and even, maybe, Stephen King. Perhaps.  That’s not to say Lavalle doesn’t bring his own keg to the party (and New Weird is nothing if not a party), but readers whose boots are already used to the outlandish soil of Weird should find themselves treading relatively familiar ground here.  Furthermore, Lavalle’s latent preoccupation with contemporary “issues” (addiction, terrorism, racism, religious hysteria, and the ennui of the modern workaday) offers a good way-in for readers more familiar with so-called Literary or Realist Fiction, to which Lavalle’s stylistic choices (first person narrative, uncannily poetic reminiscences of early childhood, constantly informative biographical sub clauses that’re kinda out-of-place and un-realistic in said first-person narrative etc.) also attest. Anyway, that’s quite enough over-worked metaphors for an opening paragraph; my point being: hurrah, we’re all invited.

Not that you’d know it from the book’s design.  I liked the non-representational blood red swirly cover art that functions as aesthetic call-back to the novel’s trippy(/druggy) themes and graphically violent content; but the hyperbolic endorsements from Mos Def and Vanity Fair, the utterly nonsensical (and non-applicable) blurby references to the X-Men and the wannabe-candid-but-is-in-fact-obviously-posed off-centre b&w author snapshot suggest a hipster target audience perhaps more shallow and transient than Big Machine deserves, which is a shame, because it’s a good book; rampant with a wry and self-aware wit so often lacking in Realist fiction, but also open to the supernatural vagaries,  non-standard plotting and fearless engagement with unanswerable questions that’s such a hallmark of the Weird.  Just try your best to ignore the embarrassingly fawning and cringeworthy author interview with which somebody’s deigned to chunk-out the back of the novel.

In brief: Ricky Rice is an American, middle-aged, (almost)ex-junky janitor and recusant suicide cult survivor recruited by a band of interventionist clairvoyant detectives who’re able to tap into fate or determinism or something via an arduous process of reading newspaper clippings while searching their feelings.  Bear with me, it’s not as naff as it sounds.  The group’s M.O. is strikingly religious, with a visually cliché but nonetheless metaphorically loaded induction ceremony comprising a long walk through a darkened room towards the voice of the de facto leader.  A twee if over-wrought creation myth combines with a quasi-messianic figure to create what is essentially a post-slavery spiritualism for black Americans.  Ricky’s understandably weary caution in the face of this has origins in his past – played out through lengthy flash-back chapters (a highlight of the book) – ; he was born into a cult founded by his three aunts who re-appropriated Judeo-Christian mythologies and re-cast the major players as American forefathers.  In both cases, the significant religious preoccupation is in propagating an expressly American piety distinct from the Old World origins of all the major religions and grounded in American history.  If these groups offer moral sanctuary for those disenchanted with the alterity of the (for want of a better word) classic religions, it also exposes Lavalle’s philosophy of America as very much still a frontier nation – young and searching for itself – America as engaged in self-creation is a thematic interest reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy or even Philip Roth.

Far from being an out-right fantasy of religion or world-building experimentation, however, Big Machine’s primary focus is an Infinite Jest-esque exploration of addiction and its attendant losses and pain.  As such, it’s down to the caprice of the individual reader whether or not encounters with dark angels, parasitic male pregnancy (a nice Alien reference?) and the intervention of the Voice of God are genuine real-world experiences, allegorically coded comments on everybody’s capacity to carry monsters within, or the hallucinatory externalisation of inner fantasies brought about by the mental strain of addiction or withdrawal or chronic loneliness or drug use or whatever.

Unfortunately this has the disappointing effect of somewhat de-fanging both the novel’s supernatural elements and its more realist focus on American social issues.  Of course it’d be foolish to suggest that one can’t sit comfortably with the other – but Big Machine’s myriad themes of religion, addiction, supernatural horror, poverty and race all kind of get in each others’ way.  The supernatural aspects of the book lack any internal consistency or logic, to the extent that by page 300 there’s a definite feeling that anything goes – which is especially frustrating when random/unexplained magical elements arrive deus ex machina to resolve significant plot events (c.f. Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore).  And while my readerly mores don’t demand constant closure and the satisfaction of a well-rounded explanation, the few-and-far-between moments of unexplained and phantasmagoric magic are too shallow to act as buffer or mitigator to the book’s more realist drug-related concerns.  The suggested promise of supernatural cure-alls bathetically undermines any sense of threat or consequence latent in the seriousness of drug-taking or prostitution or terrorism.

Victor Lavalle clearly has a beautiful cathedral of an imagination, and an obvious deep love of horror/fantasy/Weird fiction, but he’s holding back, perhaps lest he alienate that percentage of his potential audience who’re exclusively interested in Big Machine as an “issues” novel.  It almost works, but too vague supernatural elements clash awkwardly with a heavy focus on contemporary Americana – which itself is often explored through long passages of expositional dialogue.  It’s a question of balance; and if anybody’s going to write the Great American Weird novel, then it probably will be Victor Lavalle.   Big Machine is almost there, but not quite; I’ll definitely queue up to buy his next novel, and look forward to the day when he really lets his imagination run riot.

Tomcat.