Two short reviews – The Gypsy’s Curse and Car by Harry Crews

Part of me was expecting to be disappointed by the two novels collected in Classic Crews along with A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. From what I had read about Harry Crews, it seemed that I might already have read Crews’ best two books in the aformentioned A Childhood and the novel A Feast of Snakes. I am happy to report that no such thing happened. What follows are short reviews that I fear will not do justice to these outstanding novels.

The Gypsy’s Curse introduces us to a very strange cast of characters. The narrator, Marvin Molar, has stumps for legs and walks everywhere on his hands. He’s about three feet tall. He can’t speak or hear. Marvin lives in a gym with an old strongman by the name of Al, who frequently refers to himself in the third person. He once had his head run over by a car (deliberately, to prove how strong he is) and now his ear looks like a cauliflour. Leroy is a boxer who got beaten up so badly that he now stumbles around, ‘punch drunk’ in perpetuity. And Pete is an old black man who is so weak that even Leroy can beat him up easily. This unlikely cast reside in Al’s gym, where strongmen and iron freaks buff their physiques daily. Everything changes when Marvin’s girlfriend Hester moves into the gym, and a cycle of increasing violence is started.

That’s the story of The Gypsy’s Curse in a paragraph, and I can see that I’m not doing much of a job in trying to explain why this book is simply a work of genius. I am going to have to come back to this in a year or so and see if I can’t work out how Crews did it. I’m stumped. This is just a book of amazing worth and everyone should read it. The only thing I’ll say against it is that it ends in predictable violence, just like A Feast of Snakes did. I hope Crews has other ways of ending his books than in mass bloodshed.

 

I suppose it’s fair to say that I regard Car as a lesser work than the three Harry Crews books I had read before it, which isn’t to say that it’s a book without worth. It certainly is, and it bears more than a passing resemblance to J. G. Ballard’s Crash, which I believe came out at a very similar time. Okay, I just checked. Crews’ novel actually preceded Ballard’s by a year, but where Crash is fairly famous and has had a film made from it, Car is just about out of print (except in this Classic Crews collection) and forgotten. Why is this? The books are quite similar in terms of their theme – that cars equals sex equals violence. I suppose the Ballard novel is more detailed, and less humorous.

In Car, Easy Mack presides over 43 acres of scrapped cars in Jacksonville, Florida. At book’s opening, we see Easy’s son Mister crushing Cadillacs. It turns out that Mister has a twin brother Herman who has run away for some reason. Then it transpires that he has become affiliated with a hotel owner named Homer Edge, and that Herman is planning on eating a brand new Cadillac, bumper to bumper. He tries… and fails. Doesn’t sound like much, I know, but then this isn’t much of a book, in terms of pages anyway. At a little over 100 pages, Car is more novella than novel, and in fact it may have worked better at a still shorter length. Despite these caveats, this is a little gem of a book with some powerful scenes and imagery. To conclude this review, I’m quoting a paragraph in which Herman realises that by eating the car, he is becoming the car:

“If he needed more air he’d turn on the air-conditioner. If he needed more strength, he’d burn a higher octane gasoline. If he needed more confidence, he’d get another hundred horses under the hood. If the light of the world bothered him, he’d tint his windshield. And his immortality lay in numberless junkyards, all easily accessible from anywhere in America. Go on down and replace his fender, replace his wheel, replace his engine even, replace everything until he was not even what he was when he started. Replace everything with all things until he was nobody because he was everybody.” (Classic Crews, p382)

I don’t think it’s going too far to say that the three books (two novels, one memoir) comprising Classic Crews are among the greatest examples of narrative I’ve ever read. If I wasn’t already jaded and cynical at my grand old age of twenty-eight about the state of the world and the prestige afforded its greatest proponents of narrative fiction, I’d wonder why Harry Crews isn’t substantially more recognised than he is. Then I think of Marvin Molar and I know why.

Harry Crews is a first rate writer; you should order this book immediately.

A reading list for summer (5/11/09)

I haven’t actually got any money at the moment, but that hasn’t stopped me from ordering a whole heap of books from Fishpond and Amazon. I periodically suffer reading cravings , maybe every four or life months, and during those times, I don’t only have to read, I have to read particular books by particular authors, even if I don’t currently own said books. So here’s a list of the books I’m anticipating sinking my teeth into over the next three months or so:

Car by Harry Crews

Celebration by Harry Crews

The Mulching of America by Harry Crews

Body by Harry Crews

Scar Lover by Harry Crews

Florida Frenzy by Harry Crews (essays by the author)

Blood and Grits by Harry Crews (essays by the author)

Getting Naked with Harry Crews (a book of interviews)

Perspectives on Harry Crews (essays about the author)

The Man Who Walks by Alan Warner

The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven by Alan Warner

The Sopranos by Alan Warner

Finch by Jeff Vandermeer

Booklife by Jeff Vandermeer (non fiction, about the writing and marketing process)

The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (biography)

Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works (a Library of America edition that remarkably only costs $16 US from Amazon)

Mr Muo’s Traveling Couch by Dai Sijie

The Crazed by Ha Jin

War Trash by Ha Jin

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

The Pickup Artist by Terry Bisson

The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan

 

That’s 22 books, and the O’Connor volume is really at least 4 books in 1. The credit card is taking a hammering.

Book Review – Morvern Callar by Alan Warner

Morvern Callar is Alan Warner’s first novel. The sequel is These Demented Lands. Of course, I read them in the wrong order, but never mind. Morvern Callar the character is a young woman living in the Scottish port town of Oban, and on the first page of the book she discovers her boyfriend’s corpse in their flat. He’s killed himself. This is where this novel diverges from traditional expectations, as instead of reporting her grisly find to the police, Morvern listens to some music, gets ready to go out, goes to a few pubs and clubs, and generally has a good time. Is she is shock and soon to come to her senses? Apparently not. And that is one of the great strengths of Morvern Callar the novel: it shatters audience expectations.

I like Warner’s writing on a number of levels, but there are some annoying aspects that I can’t seem to get over at the moment, so I’ll get them out of the way here and get on with the positive side of my review. Firstly, there’s no apostrophes in the book, which I find really grating. So ‘didn’t’ is ‘didnt’ and suchlike. Cormac McCarthy seems to do this too. Secondly, there’s no quotation marks for speech. None! Doubly annoying. This is an aspect of so-called ‘postmodern’ writing I can do without – the deliberate omission of functional punctuation. Quotations aren’t there to look cool, they’re there to do a job. This leads me to think of Warner as a bit on the self-consciously pretentious side. It could be argued that these omissions are due to the fact that Morvern herself has a low level of literacy, and given that she is the narrator, this might seem warranted. But I don’t think this is justified, as Warner explains that his character could never have written the words in this novel anyway. So the point is lost. If this was the point, then Warner would have had to have done away with punctuation altogether. That reminds me of some of the essays I have to read in my job, only 240 pages long. The horror.

I’m not done with the things that annoyed me about Morvern Callar. This next one is a biggie. The phrase ‘I used the goldish lighter on a Silk Cut’ (which is presumably a brand of cigarette) is repeated at least fifty and perhaps one hundred times throughout the book. Yes, there are subtle variations, but essentially this phrase crops up on something like one in every two pages. Had Warner written ‘I lit a cigarette’, the phrase would have been perfectly anonymous, but the author’s insistence on itemising trivial details and brands prevents him from doing this. Yes, yes, it’s all about the character and how she is caught up in a world of brands and material possessions. I get the point. But it annoyed me all the same. My fourth complaint is that the book is littered with specific artist/album/track information about what Morvern is listening to at any given time. I think it’s fair to say that such information takes up five percent of the book.

All right. That’s enough complaining. Despite these annoyances, I did enjoy reading Morvern Callar. What we have here is a modern existential drama that owes more than a little to the French (Sartre and Camus). Interestingly, even though this novel is told in the first person, there’s almost nothing in the way of interior monologue. Think about that for a minute. How can you have a novel in this mode without information about what the character is thinking at any given time? Warner proves that it can be done but, as a consequence, the narrative becomes detached and impersonal. Thus we read of Morvern’s amoral debauchery (and there is plenty of that) without any sense that she is repentent, remorseful, or otherwise sorry.

About half way through the narrative, Morvern chops her boyfriend’s body up and buries the pieces in the mountains. Worse, she steals the novel he’d completed before his death, and publishes it to great acclaim under her own name. Here my blood was boiling and I began to hate this character. With the advance from the publisher, Morvern goes on a drinking/drugging/partying spree in Spain, and when she returns, she discovers that her dead boyfriend has left her his inheritance as well. Cue more partying, a lot more. Finally the money is gone and Morvern is forced to return to Oban again. This is hedonism to the nth degree, and Warner offers no apology. Morvern doesn’t get her comeuppance and the police don’t discover her boyfriend’s body. And so the reader, depending on his/her perspective, might be left floundering.

There are a number of other positive elements I haven’t really discussed here. Warner writes very vividly of Oban and surrounds, and many passages are quite beautiful. Many of the shenanigans described herein are very amusingly told. There’s a lot of local slang that I enjoyed trying to translate. So ‘oxters’ must be underarms, to ‘boak’ is to vomit, to be ‘rampant’ is to be aroused and ‘Strathclyde’s Finest’ are the police.  In summary, Warner is a wily fox of a writer who sets traps for the unwitting reader. It would be easy to become outraged by Morvern Callar, and in a different time and place this is exactly the kind of book that would be denounced and even banned. But I will feel no outrage. I will get over it and read The Man Who Walks next.

Book Review – A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews

I’ve been pretty much obsessed with Harry Crews lately, so much so that I re-read his novel A Feast of Snakes simply because I didn’t have anything else of his to read. I scoured the internet for anything about him, which didn’t add up to much. A few bits and pieces here and there. And everything that I read reinforced the rapidly solidifying notion that Harry Crews was a great writer, a vital (for me) writer. Why exactly I have taken to this man and his writing so completely is guesswork, but I have. And his reputation seems to rest more than anything on his memoir of growing up in Bacon County, Georgia: A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. I’m reading this in the volume Classic Crews, which also includes A Gypsy’s Curse and Car, which I’ll get to next.

One of the first things that stuck me about this was the number of similarities with A Feast of Snakes. Names of people often overlap (Lottie Mae and Berenice are two that spring to mind). In this memoir, as in the novel, there’s moonshine, drunken raging of every kind, blacks and whites living together (though not exactly equitably), shotguns, and a sensation of the protagonist (Joe Lon or Crews himself) spinning out of control as he discovers the terror and beauty of the world. This is gripping, shocking and brutal, but if a book is intended to open a window into another time and place, to allow us to see through, then there’s no more successful book than A Childhood that I can currently think of.

Crews’ childhood was a dismal one; one that makes my own miseries tremble into insignificance. Born to dirt-poor sharecroppers in one of the poorest parts of America, at the tail end of the Great Depression, Crews suffered almost unimaginable hardship and misfortune in the first half dozen years of his life. His own father dead before he was two years old, Crews looked up to another man, his uncle, as a father, only to fall victim to that man’s trail of drunken destruction. One scene, in which the not yet six year-old Crews is told that he can never see his father again, and that that man isn’t even his real father, is among the most powerful things I have read. And there’s a section where the boy is almost boiled alive in boiling water, after which his skin and fingernails come off in sheets.

A Childhood appears to have been widely recognised as not only this author’s finest achievement, but as one of the greatest memoirs about life in the south of the United States in the twentieth century. The writing has a clarity and power that most writers, including myself, can barely dream of. But it took its toll on Crews, who appears to have sunken into a long depression upon completing this work. This is as close to perfection is one is ever likely to find between the pages of a book, and if that seems like unreasonable hyperbole, read it for yourself and claim otherwise.

Wrapped Up in Books, Or Two Writers Newly Known to Me: Harry Crews and Alan Warner

I was listening to one of my favourite songs from one of my favourite albums on the drive home from work today, Belle & Sebastian’s ‘Wrapped Up in Books’ from their Dear Catastrophe Waitress album. The central line of the song is “Our aspirations/are wrapped up in books” and I was thinking that it might be true for them, but it must be doubly true for me. The feeling I get when reading a new author I especially like, as has been the case so far with Harry Crews and Alan Warner, is ecstatic. Reading A Feast of Snakes the other day, I had to read several pages or passages a second time, not because I had lost the thread of the narrative, but because the writing was so good that I wanted to relive the experience of reading it. I don’t think I get that sense of exhilaration for any other activity, which I suppose is a strange thing to say about reading, but it’s true for me. I love reading even more than I love writing, and although I do read in part to learn from other writers, my major reason for reading is in the pleasure of it. But I’m such a picky reader that I rarely get that feeling now. I get it from Harry Crews and Alan Warner, which is why I did a stupid thing today: I ordered a few books by these authors from fishpond.com.au on my credit card, even though I’m basically broke at the moment. You know you’re addicted to something when you have to have it, even when you can’t afford it. I’m addicted to reading.

And I’m especially addicted to finding new authors. Not necessarily new new authors, but authors that are new to me. Harry Crews’ first novel was first published in 1968, but I hadn’t heard of him until a few days ago. Alan Warner is more contemporary, but he still started publishing his novels in the mid-nineties. Take a look at these suckers:

Harry Crews:

Alan Warner:

Warner looks fairly normal to me, but Crews? My God, look at that man’s face. I mean this respectfully: he’s a fearsome sight. The books I’ve ordered are Classic Crews (a compilation of two novels and one autobiography), Morvern Callar (prequel to These Demented Lands, already reviewed) and The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven. I can’t wait to read them.

Book Review – A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

This very rarely happens: that I should pick up a book by an author I’ve never heard of, bring it home, spend three hours of something approaching reading rapture, and be ready to write a review on the same evening. But that was my day, and this is Harry Crews and A Feast of Snakes. Some basic research on Google and Wikipedia has shown me that Crews has had a long and somewhat successful writing career in the US, with more than ten books to his name. He’s certainly not a household name here and I doubt he is in the US, which is a shame considering he’s ten times the writer Khaled Hosseini is. It’s hardly a surprise though, given the nature of Crews’ subject matter and style. Or perhaps I should say his sustained attack on the reader’s values and sensibilities. This book has the force of a sledgehammer and it is enough to convince me that Crews is an excellent writer, perhaps even a great one. I’d have to read the rest of his books to know for sure.

So what is A Feast of Snakes about? In the town of Mystic, Georgia, in 1975 (the year before the novel was published), Joe Lon Mackey lives in a trailer on a ten-acre property with his wife Elfie and two infant sons. Joe Lon runs a quasi-legal liquor outfit that specialises in selling moonshine to ‘niggers’ (as they are referred to through the book). Joe Lon is about twenty or so, a serious alcoholic, a wife-beater, a rapist, an adulterer, and finally a multiple murderer. His father, Big Joe, trains pit bulls that are so ferocious that they always win their fights. Joe Lon’s sister, known mostly as ‘Beeda,’ has gone insane and spends her days in her room watching television, with a bed pan under her bed. His mother has committed suicide after she tried to run away with another man and was hauled back. The town’s sherrif, Buddy Matlow, routinely locks up black women in the prison with a view to raping them. Joe Lon’s friend Willard is a sadistic terror, much as Joe Lon himself is. Lottie Mae, a black woman raped by Buddy Matlow, becomes so terrified of snakes that she carries a razor with her at all times in self defense. And I’m not even getting started here.

This is a black book. It is frequently gruesome and unflinching in its description of some of the most squalid acts human beings can commit, and yet it is, at times, uproariously funny. Some of the dialogue (in Southern drawl) needed to be read again and again. The central idea is that of the rattlesnake, which Mystic is famous for. Once a year, an increasing number of tourists and snake fanciers descend on the town with a view to catching and killing as many rattlesnakes as they can find. The whole town is snake mad. The novel is pulsing with sadistic violence and there basically aren’t any likeable characters at all in it, with the possible exception of Lottie Mae (and she is more of a pathetic figure than a sympathetic one).

Crews is the kind of writer who simply describes all of this without any obvious moralising, but the material is so depraved, so shocking, that one can’t but read this as anything other than a stern condemnation of the society of violence depicted here. I don’t know if this book has a cult following, but it certainly should have, as it’s simply one of the better novels I’ve read in a long time.

Book Review – The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

*This review contains spoilers. Come to think of it, practically all of my reviews do.*

Even I–who usually tries to steer clear of the groupthink of bestseller lists and the like–was vaguely familiar with Hosseini and his book The Kite Runner. Its major selling point for me was that it was about Afghanistan, a country I know little about except that which is fed to us via news services. Apparently this book has sold over 10 million copies, and that doesn’t include me, as I bought The Kite Runner secondhand. Hosseini has written one subsequent novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, which I am now fairly eager to read.

The Kite Runner opens in Kabul in the 1960s, and we are introduced to an all-male family setup consisting of the patriarch Baba, his young son Amir (the novel’s narrator), adult servant Ali, and his young son Hassan. Amir’s mother died in childbirth and Hassan’s ran away shortly after his birth, so there are no women present. The opening section details the fairly idyllic life of Amir in 1960s Kabul, which I was surprised to find was nothing like the Kabul of more recent times. It seems that for the wealthy at least, Afghanistan was a pleasant place to live as late as 50 years ago. This is one of the great joys of reading for me–to discover people, places and times I had not known existed, to read history brought to life in narrative form. This is where The Kite Runner excels, for Hosseini creates a vivid picture of that time and place.

The story mainly concerns the exploits of Amir and Hassan, who are so close as to be virtually brothers, with one important difference: Amir is a Pashtun and Hassan a Hazara. I had heard the word Pashtun before but couldn’t have told you what it referred to, so herein lies the other great power of narrative fiction: it can be educational. Basically, the Pashtuns are Sunni Muslims and the Hazaras Shi’a, but in Afghanistan it appears that the Pashtuns are very much in command, and the Hazaras a despised underclass. That’s the limit of my current understanding on the matter. As a short aside, I question the value of organised religion (be it Islam, Christianity or whatever) if it can create such divides between people (Sunnis and Shias, Catholics and Protestants) that it becomes possible to butcher the other group in the name of God.  But I digress. Amir and Hassan have a great love for each other, but as we discover, it is more sacrifice on the part of the Hazara boy, and more demand on the part of the Pashtun. Here the author creates a useful microcosm of the wider issue.

This is a book with an epic sweep that is actually quite old-fashioned. It reminded me of the novels of John Irving and writers of his ilk (and era). There are no postmodern conundrums here. The book covers nearly thirty years in time, and charts the demise of the more modern Afghanistan at the hands of various aggressors: first reformists, then the Soviets, then the Northern Alliance, and finally the Taliban. Some of this is brought to life quite spectacularly. In a memorable scene where Baba and his son flee Kabul, they are forced to hide inside a petrol tanker along with many others. One boy dies as a result of the fumes, and his father shoots himself in the head in despair. I’ve missed out one of the most important scenes in the book, where Amir and Hassan win a kite-flying contest that gives the book its name, but you can read that for yourself.

The middle section of the book is possibly the weakest, as it is set in America and covers about twenty years in little more than 100 pages. The main focus here is the slow demise of Baba, Amir’s father. While it is true that Baba comes to life in this section, there is little else of interest here and the fleamarkets of San Fernando’s Afghan community aren’t quite as interesting as the events occurring in the mother country at the same time. Baba dies, Amir grows up and marries an Afghan woman called Soraya, and they try to have children. And fail. Amir becomes a mediocre writer, and now I know why I am reminded of John Irving here! The situation is a little like that in The World According to Garp. Quite similar, in fact. There it is: Hosseini has replicated a mode of writing that flourished in the US in the 60s and 70s, with spectacular (for him) success.

I found the final section quite riveting but somewhat predictable. Amir grows comfortable in his life in the US, forgetting all about his friend Hassan whom he left more than 20 years before. But when an old family friend summons him to Pakistan in June 2001, it all comes flooding back. One of the interesting things about this book is that the narrator, Amir, is something of a coward, and his self-loathing is in itself loathsome. At least, I found it so. What we get here is a heartfelt but cliched quest for redemption, in which Amir must right the wrongs of his childhood, where he allowed Hassan to be brutally raped by a local bully by the name of Assef. Hassan has died at the hands of the Taliban, but his eight year old son Sohrab still lives, albeit barely, in Kabul.

I won’t go through all the details of this, but suffice to say that it became blatantly obvious to me that Sohrab would be adopted by the childless Amir and Soraya at least 100 pages before it played out. The ins and outs of how this comes to pass are, admittedly, quite interesting, but in another cruel twist, Amir must confront the very same Assef that raped his friend Hassan to win the boy’s freedom. And the son himself commits an act in Amir’s defence that mirrors something his father almost did decades before. It’s warm, it’s heartfelt, but it’s all awfully convenient for the plot’s arc. To be sure, the novel’s conclusion does not play out in stereotypical fashion, and there is no glossing over the ongoing problems for all concerned, but at the heart of this novel there is an antiquated structure: a quest for redemption in which fate (or God?) appears to be pulling at the actors’ strings (but of course it’s just Hosseini).

I can see why this novel has sold 10 million copies. It’s essentially a feel good novel, despite some very graphic content. And its also very safe politically in its pro-America, anti-Taliban rhetoric. This is not to say that I have anything nice to say about the Taliban, but simply that this book appeared at a time when the tension between Americans and Afghans would have been at its zenith, and that this novel placates and soothes the reader. Everything, it seems to be saying, will work out in the end. Somehow, sometime, it will work out.

Yellowcake Springs: three quarters done

Okay, I won’t make the mistake of putting a picture of a mushroom cloud into this post. I got a ridiculous amount of hits on the post last time I did that. Anyway, I managed to write nearly 11,000 words on my novel Yellowcake Springs over this past two weeks, which is just shy of the 12,000 words I had aimed to write. A common theme here. This means I am now the proud owner of 64,000 words or 221 double spaced pages, which represents around three quarters of the total manuscript. I had wanted the first draft to be 100,000 words in length, but I’m not going to get there. The book has really short chapters: 39 at the moment and more than 50 when completed. I myself like books with lots of short chapters. It makes them seem easier to get through. So I’m writing a book for lazy readers like myself.

The first draft will be finished in the summer holidays, Dec 09/Jan 10, and I expect I’ll have time to tinker with it extensively before returning to school (work) at the beginning of Feb 10. Next stop: world domination!

All right, this post wouldn’t be complete without a picture, so here’s a picture depicting a scene from my novel. Er, kinda:

More books to read – 2/10/09

At the end of 2008 I was pleased to be able to say that I had read around 50 books in the year at the rate of one per week. I’m not entirely sure why, but I’ve read far fewer books in 2009, and with the year entering its final quarter, I thought it was time to read a couple more. So off I went to the two local secondhand bookstores here in Northam. I’ve got three to read now, but knowing me, I’ll be doing well to end up reading two of them.

Regeneration by Pat Barker – this is about Sigfreid Sassoon in World War One. I’ve had this open for weeks now, but I haven’t gotten around to finishing it yet. Quite compelling reading, but easy to put down, as I discovered.

Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini – I’ve definitely heard of this author, but only vaguely. I’ve barely looked at this, but it’s about Afghanistan and I like reading about different cultures. Sold.

Vignettes from the Late Ming translated by Yang Ye – I’m a sucker for anything Chinese, so I was sold on this straight away. It’s a collection of hsaio-p’in, a kind of prose vignette style from the Ming dynasty (17th century). Sold.

On another note, I am working on my novel Yellowcake Springs again. I’ve managed 5000 words so far in these school holidays, and I aim to write another 7000 words in the coming days, taking my ms. to 65,000 words in total. The entire ms. will be around 90,000 in first draft form.

Book Review – These Demented Lands by Alan Warner

I hadn’t heard of Scottish writer Alan Warner, much less read one of his books, and to make matters worse, These Demented Lands is apparently a sequel to a book called Molvern Callar. With a title like that though, I had to give it a try. I’m glad I did.

These Demented Lands is a strange kind of hybrid between something approximating realistic fiction, some kind of lite-apocalyptic fare, and there’s a fair bit of drug culture thrown in for good measure. There’s more than a few references to modern British bands too. The opening sees our nameless protagonist (her name is the ‘Molvern Callar’ of the first book) washing up on an island off Scotland with a young girl in tow. I can’t really be bothered trying to explain how this bizarre slipstream fiction works, but suffice to say it reads like what I might imagine someone on drugs to experience. (Notice I didn’t say ‘write’ – the prose is excellent, though difficult in places.) The book’s title is an accurate one, as what we basically have here is a rural Scottish setting seen through ‘weird’ goggles. That’s These Demented Lands in a nutshell.

Characters have outlandish names like The Aircrash Investigator, The Argonaut, and the chief antagonist, John Brotherhood. Brotherhood runs some kind of run down hotel (The Drome Hotel) for newlyweds, and our protagonist wants to go there for some reason. Here’s an area where These Demented Lands isn’t so flash: in terms of plot and character motivation. Okay, maybe these things seem passe to some, but I still expect them to exist in prose fiction. What plot this novel has is fairly weak, and characters seem to do things simply because it’d be cool. Okay. That was my main reservation about Warner’s novel, but it didn’t stop me from enjoying it.

The book is split into several sections, and the narration is split between Molvern Callar and The Aircrash Investigator. There are a lot of flyers and various other miscellania scattered through the book too, just to break things up (and, presumably, to look cool – there’s a fair bit of looking cool in this book). There’s also a fair bit of bad feeling between the Investigator and Brotherhood, and it turns out that neither are really who they claim to be. The Aircrash Investigator is looking into a crash that killed a couple of people on the island ten years ago. He’s also after a propellor (later he is forced to carry it on his back, much like Jesus Christ). Trying to explain the plot really does me no good here. There’s a memorable scene in which hot chilli con carne is thrown around everywhere. I think what I am trying to say here is that These Demented Lands is somewhat less than the sum of its parts, that it doesn’t really add up to anything.

But what amazing parts this book has! I liked one passages so much that I thought I’d quote it here:

“Gibbon had been delighted to find an economical way to get a lick of something waterproof to douse the boards. He’d been too mean to buy paint: when the biscuit bakery at Far Places had gone bust, Gibbon had taken away gallons of raspberry food-colouring from the auction. To his amazement, the stuff was completely waterproof; the lower sections of the outhouse were soon crucially pink: raspberry pink. As a paint it proved strudy enough but the outhouse’s downfall came when Gibbon’s cattle strayed from the fields into the yard and began licking the walls. Not only did they remove all the colouring up to five feet round the structure, the constant licking and pushing of the cattle wrecked sections of the walls and Gibbon had to fence off the outhouse to keep it from destruction.” (p 94-5)

The book was worth me reading for that passage alone, which had me laughing out loud. That doesn’t happen very often. This book manages to be literary, challenging, humorous and engaging. But ultimately, like a drug experience, it’s ephemeral. I’ll be looking out for other books by Alan Warner all the same.