I’m giving up on Last Drinks

Well, this tends to happen quite a bit. I start reading a novel, finding it fairly interesting at first, but then my interest tapers off dramatically. It’s interesting that I should struggle with McGahan’s Last Drinks, because I found the subject matter (corruption in 1980s Queensland and its aftermath) quite compelling. How is it that Praise and 1988 could be so gripping and this novel so easy to put down? I haven’t got an answer for this. Last Drinks seems like a transitional novel, by a writer learning how to write about something other than himself. It’s clunky and slow in places. And I’m pulling the pin.

Onto The White Earth.

Book Review – In the Same Streets You’ll Wander Endlessly by J. J. DeCeglie

In the Same Streets You’ll Wander Endlessly is J. J. DeCeglie’s first volume of short stories and second book overall. In some of these stories we are re-introduced to Sep (the sea is not yet full’s protagonist) or at least someone very much like him. Many of these stories overlap in their physical and thematic terrain, but a number are notably different in their style and genre. This is important because it shows that DeCeglie has range as well as depth.

Around half of these stories follow roughly the same direction. In “Early Lasting Sunlight,” the unnamed narrator is in New York, far away from his native Fremantle. He drinks coffee, thinks about Kerouac and Bukowski, and chats up a waitress at a cafe. There’s some sex, some writing or discussion of writing, and a fair bit of drinking. This is what I would term the typical DeCeglie story, in that the writer appears to be charting territory (both physical and mental) that is personally familiar to him. This is a strength and a weakness: a strength in that the stories seem concrete, actual; and a weakness in that, as a result, the narratives aren’t ’sculpted.’ This is DeCeglie in realism mode.

“Lights Behind the City” is a short piece that is highly reminiscent of the sea is not yet full. Here DeCeglie depicts a night on the town in powerful, relentless prose. Some descriptive passages are especially vivid (“Rain spraying from above pattering the everything around us and lifting the heat from the orange glow road”) and DeCeglie uses direct reader address to encourage us to imagine the scene (“Even before you get into the starkness of the streets after nightmarish taxi trips you’re so very inebriated that you articulate spun gold and drip mistrust”). Here again we witness the DeCeglien staple of literary discussion interspersed with drunken debauchery.

“Summer Spent” is much the same. Here Sep is mentioned by name, but he may well have been the unnamed protagonist of the first two stories as well. His friends Stone, Irish, Chase and others keep turning up, suggesting that most of these stories are interrelated. But this reads less like a short story and more like a few pages from a novel. “Underground” is the first story in this volume to change things up. Here DeCeglie describes a train bomb in convincing detail. One thing I noticed here is that this writer is able to depict personal injury exceedingly well. These are no metaphorical injuries, they are actual (“the wound was packed with shrapnel, he could feel it still hot on his fingers, tried to dislodge it slightly, he could tell it was interfering with bone”). This lurches between visceral description of the train and recollection of an earlier time as a swimming instructor.

“Unforced Error” is among my favourites in this volume. One reason for this is that here DeCeglie alters his style from Kerouac to Hemingway. A matter of taste perhaps, but I will always champion prose that is clear over that which is murky (“There was no sleep to be got that night and it came with the heat and noise and weight of other things”). Some of these sentences run-on to an extent, but not to the same extent as they do in the sea is not yet full. The narrator’s voice is clear and strong here: “Sometimes life was tough he thought, this is tough, it’s awful, but he felt it had to happen even so and was why life was tough because even though you knew things would end up badly you still did the things that made them that way.” I noticed in the publication details that “Unforced Error” appears to be the only story in this volume not previously published. Is this because it is a more recent story than the others?

“Dark Shadow Off the Fire” is the best story in In the Same Streets You’ll Wander Endlessly. There, I’ve said it, stated my opinion. Why is it the best? Because here DeCeglie invites us into an unknown (and terrifying) world. Is this set in the past, present or future? I can’t tell. But it’s a kind of rural apocalypse, full of murder, rape and revenge. And it’s gripping in the extreme. We are hit with this story’s intensity from the first line (“The sun struck down on him like a wall of scalding water”) and it never lets up. Our protagonist is in desperate trouble. His family have been killed, his home destroyed, and he is in great danger. Floating into his mind, however, are images of something else entirely (“her perfumed creamy skin lends through with the pale rich blue of veins in her breasts and the underside“). A man called Smith has left our narrator to die tied to a hitching post in the desert sun, in a situation that reminds me of Gabrielle Lord’s novel Salt. His crimes seems to be carousing with Smith’s girl, a crime punishable by death. Despite some serious injuries (which are depicted with conviction), our narrator manages to free himself and wreak revenge on Smith. After that, things seem to descend into some hellish pit of Aboriginals versus whites, whites versus whites, and man against man. This is extraordinary, and I will need to read it again to appreciate it fully. In this story, DeCeglie offers us a dark vision far outreaching the urban angst of modern life.

“River into Sea” is reasonably good, but it’s too similar for my liking to what has gone before. “Disturbed Reminiscence and Existence in Broad” seems like a different take on “Lights Behind the City.” “By the River” strips the usual DeCeglie plot down to its barest essentials, tersely describing a sexual encounter. “In the Same Streets You’ll Wander Endlessly” is well written, but by this stage in the volume I was tiring of what seemed to me to be the same plot rewritten and reimagined. I suppose this is a matter of taste, but I prefer it when DeCeglie envisages something more than yet another turbulent romance.

I did like “The Wench is Dead,” however. If I am critical of the ’sameness’ of many of DeCeglie’s stories, it is partly because they depict a line of thinking at a similar stage of development. “The Wench is Dead,” however, takes some of these ideas further, to good effect. Here we see our narrator gambling recklessly (but apparently quite successfully), thinking about “when girls weren’t just a rough smacking thump or regretted sorrow.” The prose is bare and stark, the mood despondent: “Working he was a partial automation. Never sleeping sufficient, thinking relentlessly of the return. Of the way the cards would arrive. The structure of the sentence.” A life lived in a state worse than Thoreau’s quiet desperation. I am reminded here of a writer I doubt DeCeglie would have heard of, Barry N. Malzberg, whose depressive worlds and gambling jaunts seem similar to the one depicted here.

“Spoken Biography of J. J. DeCeglie” is a minor piece, mildly amusing but nothing more, and “Still in the Fury” is an extremely short but effective piece that seems to co-inhabit a universe with “Dark Shadow Off the Fire.” In summary, this is an uneven volume but one which offers great promise in this writer. To my mind, too many of these tales tell essentially the same story, and as such would be better merged into a single narrative. Several, however, break the mold in sometimes spectacular fashion. “Dark Shadow Off the Fire” deploys DeCeglie’s dark vision to greatest effect, and “The Wench is Dead” impressively depicts life during and after a fall from grace. From the publishing notes, I can’t help but notice that the stories I think strongest were published more recently, and the minor pieces in 2005 or 2006. This can only be a good thing.

Book review – the sea is not yet full by J. J. Deceglie

the sea is not yet full is the first novel by Perth writer J. J. Deceglie. Published in 2005, it is a story about a young man named Sep. Sep is in his early twenties, has a girlfriend named Sarah and a job as a teacher. He lives in Fremantle, Western Australia. Sep and myself seem to have a bit in common, in that we’re probably the same age, both have jobs as teachers, both live or have lived in the Perth Metropolitan area, and both support the Fremantle Dockers. What I’m saying here is that the terrain this novel covers will seem very familiar to anyone who has grown up in Perth, with its slew of pubs and nightclubs, in the late nineties and early two-thousands. Streets are explicitly named, pubs go by their actual names. This is a world I know.

Contrasted with the world of Perth and specifically Fremantle circa 2000-05 is the literary world of twentieth century literature. Famous names are dropped throughout the sea is not yet full: Hemingway, Miller, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, Joyce and others. Co-incidentally, Sep’s account reads somewhat like the work of many of the above names, but especially, to this reader, the writing of James Joyce and Jack Kerouac. Parts of this novel are told in Joycean stream of consciousness word associations, and part in breathless, sentence-less sections that stream forth for several pages. J. J. Deceglie has written the first Beat novel about Perth, or at least the first I have had the pleasure to read.

Not that the sea is not yet full is necessarily a perfect or ideal work, however. While I don’t have a problem with most of the literary innovations herein, such as sentences (and sections) that begin without capital letters, or speech without quotation marks, or sentences that habitually run on for half a page or more, the combination of some of these techniques occasionally lessens the readability of the text. For example, Deceglie is in the habit of having speech embedded within sentences without any form of demarcation as to which part of the line is spoken. Furthermore, as the sentences often run together, it was occasionally difficult to decide who was saying what. Of course this is a literary device like any other, but I did find at times that I needed to re-read or re-interpret a sentence to decide what was going on. There were occasionally minor spelling errors (‘too’ rather than ‘to’) as well as minor typographical errors regarding apostrophes. These are minor quibbles–for sure–and perhaps I am rubbing against the grain of the novel to highlight them, but they were things I noticed nonetheless.

So what is the sea is not yet full actually about? Firstly, I discovered that the title is part of a passage from the Bible, specifically Ecclesiastes 1:7: “All the rivers run into the sea yet the sea is not full unto the place from whence the rivers come thither they return again.” Now, I’m no Bible scholar, but I know someone who is, so perhaps I shall ask him to enlighten me as to the meaning of this passage. But the novel is straightforward enough, at least to begin with. When we first meet Sep, he is about to embark on his cherished summer holidays from his teaching job. Primarily, for Sep, this will entail drinking, talking about literature, fishing, but above all else, it means fucking or thinking about fucking. If this seems blunt, then so is the sea is not yet full. This is not for the squeamish, but then true literature rarely is. This material reminds me of another Beat, or perhaps the Godfather of the Beats, William Burroughs.

Imagine Naked Lunch without the heroin and with girls instead of boys. Change the set from Tangiers and New York to Fremantle and Perth. Voila! You have the sea is not yet full. This is intended as a compliment, for if Deceglie might not yet have attained Burroughs (or perhaps Genet’s) level of spiritual effluence, then it is not for the want of trying. And so this is a book about cocks, cunts, toilets and mouths. It is a book about vomit, saliva and buckets of semen. It is a dirty book and a degrading one. This is no use in denying this. And if Sep is trying to transcend his grimy reality through girls and booze and filth, then he isn’t getting very far. A single sentence on page 86 seems to sum up the novel perfectly: “Upward holy thoughts brought down by male human cunt lust.” And therein lies the hinge on which the sea is not yet full swings: the high and lofty versus the low and dirty.

Throughout this book, Sep is pining after an earlier girlfriend, Sully. We are given snippets of information about this, and it becomes clear that Sep is in some kind of moral freefall. He knows he is sinking and yet he continues to sink. He cheats on his current girlfriend Sarah with an array of young and old women alike, in beds and in one instant in a toilet. But Sep seems to derive little satisfaction from these encounters, instead spiraling down into an increasingly bleak cycle of drunken debauchery, guilty reflection, renewal (in the form of fishing trips with his brother Chris and other outdoor pursuits) and back to debauchery. If this seems grim, then it is because life is often like this, and this is often how people treat one another. Sep seems to long for something more, which is mainly defined in his longing for the purer Sully, but he is at the bottom of a deep well looking up at the sky.

The lifestyle is the problem, with its drinking and drug taking and debauched drudgery. Sep knows this and yet he struggles to escape from it. I am reminded here of Andrew McGahan, with his depressed, nihilistic characters and their futile obsessions. But where McGahan is prosaic and pedestrian (with his appealingly frank straightforwardness), then Deceglie is more cunning, more literary, more high-brow. It is a potent mix and, for the most part, a successful one. There is a clash occurring in the sea is not yet full, between the world of twentieth century European and American literature and twenty-first century Western Australia, with its vacuousness and nihilism. This is an age after history is finished, Deceglie seems to be suggesting.
It is a time when there’s nothing left to tell. And yet our small lives flicker on.

I liked one passage so much that I will reproduce it in full here in closing:

“I say fuck you, trying to turn the world into a pile of sameness, into little read stale waste balls of toe crust; all of you with anything inside you, rush to the libraries and read the greats, make note to read the ones the publishers rejected, the ones who refused to give in the to the suited devil average hack, who wrote til their fingernails bled and then sold their manuscripts door to door, send in your manuscript with the vomit stains you added whilst revolted by the indiscretions of everyday bookshop blurbs [...] ” (p 88 )

If that seems disgusting, then you need not apply here. Deceglie is railing against the smug world of publishers and contracts and signings, and I hear him. If you would like to hear him too, then you can contact the author directly at jjdeceglie@yahoo.com.au

Writers of interest – J.J. Deceglie

J. J. Deceglie is a Perth writer, author of two books: “the sea is not yet full” (a novel), and “In the Same Streets You’ll Wander Endlessly” (short stories). According to the biographical note in the front of the book of stories, “his works have been published in France, the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia.” Many of those short stories are freely available on the net, and they have been collected for the first time in “In the Same Streets You’ll Wander Endlessly.”

If you are interested in reading these books, then you can contact the author directly at jjdeceglie@yahoo.com.au

I’m taking a short break from McGahan’s Last Drinks to read some of J. J. Deceglie’s work. Interestingly, I am finding Last Drinks a LOT harder to get through than McGahan’s earlier novels, but I will persevere.

Last thing. If you are a young or newly published writer and want someone to read and review your published book (be it self published or otherwise), all you have to do is leave a note hereabouts. If you wish to send me a copy of your book, I will be only too happy to read it and review it here. You can expect a review of somewhere between 800-1500 words. This serves a mutual self interest in that you get a little bit of exposure for your work and I get a free book to read. Works for me.

Book Review – 1988 by Andrew McGahan

1988 is McGahan’s second novel and prequel to his Vogel award-winning Praise. It’s written in the same straightforward style, with the same frankness and absence of guile, and with a similar sense of narrative drive. Exactly where this narrative drive comes from is a mystery to me, as there’s nothing especially interesting about the events of 1988. Despite this, I managed to rip through the book in around five hours.

We are reintroduced to Praise’s protagonist, Gordon, at an earlier stage of his life. He is living in a share house with an increasingly large number of Chinese migrants, and working part time in a bottle shop. This is familiar terrain for readers of Praise. Early on, Gordon decides to take up his friend Wayne’s offer of a six month stint at a lighthouse in the Northern Territory. I should also mention that Brisbane is in preparation for the Bicentennial celebrations. Gordon and Wayne are an unlikely duo – Gordon is depressive, straight-forward and competent, and Wayne is moody, artistic and suave. Gordon is supposed to be a writer and Wayne a painter, but neither of them get a great deal of work done in this book.

The first few chapters detail Gordon and Wayne’s road trip from Brisbane to Darwin. Nothing especially interesting happens. Upon arrival at Darwin, they discover that they will have to share the job as weather station workers at Cape Don, which is a remote part of NT. There seems to be some kind of sexual feeling between the two young men, but nothing comes of it. Gordon spends a night being jealous that Wayne is apparently off with a couple of young backpackers, but again, nothing comes of it. Finally they make it to Cape Don, where they will work for six months.

Things start off fairly promisingly, as the job is easy, but it isn’t long before isolation and boredom begin to eat away at Gordon, Wayne, and the incumbent bushranger Vince. Things fall into a pattern of very heavy drinking and general slobbery. Gordon’s physical and mental wellbeing deteriorates as the novel progresses, a pattern that mirrors Praise. McGahan seems to be saying that this kind of lifestyle is toxic in the extreme, and yet no one seems to care enough to do anything about it.

Gordon even takes up smoking, despite his chronic asthsma. This is self destructive and nihilistic, and yet McGahan offers no real commentary on the right or wrong of the situation. This is both a strength and weakness: a strength in that McGahan is able to describe a certain lifestyle and state of mind extremely accurately; and a weakness in that, as a consequence, the book seems to lack a moral compass. Gordon’s life becomes increasingly wretched. His writing has stagnated, his body is falling apart, and his mind is a shambles. This mirrors the ending of Praise, but here there is a small glimmer of hope in the form of the trip to Cobourg with Allan Price and the rest of the Gurig clan. McGahan isn’t one to ram a theme down your throat, but he seems to be suggesting that the lifestlyle (and perhaps spirituality) of the Aboriginals is preferable to the ennui and self-destruction of the whites.

It isn’t long before Gordon has managed to upset the Gurig clan, however. The one thing I’ll say for this book is that there are no illusions harboured within. This is gritty realism at its…well, its grittiest. Nor is there anything approaching pretentiousness. Never is a false note struck. On the other hand, this is unrelentingly depressing. There’s no redeeming value in Gordon’s life. Nothing to be optimistic about. 1988 ends with Gordon meeting Cynthia, who we already know well from Praise. So there’s nothing good to come in the immediate future. Overall, it would appear that 1988 is a lesser book than Praise. Same style, same stark truthfulness, same nihilism. There’s no development between the two books, almost to the extent that it would appear that McGahan had painted himself into a corner. I will be interested to read Last Drinks next, to see how the author extricated himself from writing about (presumably) his own life in the bleakest of fashions.

It’s McGahan month

My new reading list contains five novels, four of which are by Andrew McGahan. I didn’t exactly plan it that way, but those were the books I picked up. So you can expect to see reviews of all five of McGahan’s novels in the near future, unless I can’t get through one or more of them.

1988 – Andrew McGahan - this is the prequel to Praise. I’ve read half of it already and will probably finish today.

Last Drinks – Andrew McGahan – don’t know much about this. It’s a crime thriller, I think.

The White Earth – Andrew McGahan – this won the Miles Franklin Award and even featured in the 2006 TEE Exam! You can’t get any more ‘establishment’ than that.

Underground – Andrew McGahan – this is a near future satire or dystopia. Sounds a bit iffy, but I will read it.

The Travel Writer – Simone Lazaroo – I was very impressed with Lazaroo’s Hungerford Award winning The World Waiting to be Made, so I’m eager to read more by her. I couldn’t find a copy of The Australian Fiancee at UWA.

Book Review – Molloy by Samuel Beckett

You have to be in the right mood for reading Beckett. What that right mood is, I’m not exactly sure, but Beckett’s ‘novels’ are about as far away from the conventions of characterisation and narrative as you can get. Molloy (first in a trilogy including Malone Dies and The Unnameable) seems to be one of his more accessible works, all things being relative. I say accessible, and yet the first part of this short novel consists of two paragraphs only, the second of which goes for more than eighty pages. No chapters, no line breaks, no relief.

And yet Molloy isn’t such a difficult book to read, if one has the requisite determination. We are introduced to a decrepit, invalid man by the name of Molloy. He’s an extremely unreliable narrator, prone to forgetting, at various times: his own name; his mother’s name; the town he lives in; and just about everything else that ‘happens’ in this narrative. Molloy is on a quest of sorts, a journey at least, but I can scarcely imagine a less appealing journey than this one. Molloy gets around by way of a bicycle, across which he rests his crutches. In one amusing incident, he is accosted by the local constabulary, demanding to see his papers. Molloy replies that the only papers he is in the habit of keeping are the ones he uses to wipe himself after he takes a shit. Not that he wipes himself all the time, mind you.

And therein is the allure of the novel Molloy. Decrepit, vagrant and infirm, not to mention callous, forgetful and timorous, Molloy is a novellistic anti-hero. The ‘quest’ involves searching for his elderly mother to obtain money. Molloy’s mother is blind and deaf, and thus Molloy communicates with her by knocking on her skull. He has a plethora of ’sucking stones,’ which he transfers from one pocket to another in the hope of periodically sucking all sixteen stones in his possession. He sleeps in the street, in caves on the beach, and for a time in the house of a woman (or maybe a man – Molloy can’t be sure) by the name of Lousse. In one passage, Molloy describes that he once counted how many times he farted in a day – the number is over three hundred, a rate of once every four minutes. But that’s insignificant, Molloy assures us.

And on it goes. Part one ends after eighty pages or so, toward the end of which Molloy is literally crawling through a forest. I suppose that’s as down as you can get. Part two is told from the perspective of a different character whose job, for some reason, is to search for Molloy. I’ve read this before, but I confess that I stopped reading here. Beckett is unique and irreplaceable but also very easy to put down. If life is without meaning, then why should we bother reading about it? Beckett’s ‘novels’ have no beginning or end, just an interminable middle.

Books I’ve given up on – 7/6/08

I’ve read about 40 books this year so far, which is a fair old rate (approx 8 per month or 2 per week). I’ve read a lot of SF, a lot of literary novels, and a few miscellaneous things. I’ve read TAG Hungerford Award winners, Vogel Award winners, and all four books in Simon Haynes “Hal Spacejock” series. There has been a handful of books, however, that I haven’t been able to get through, even though I planned on reading them. Here are a few:

The Alphabet of Light and Dark – Danielle Wood

I got this because of the outstanding title and the fact that it is a Vogel award winner. Unfortunately, the book looks less than appealing. It’s all subjective, of course, but I couldn’t get into this at all. It’s about a lighthouse in Tasmania, apparently. I’m giving this a miss.

A Whispering of Fish – Christopher Murray

This was the TAG Hungerford winner in 2000, and thus it was on my to-read list. I’ve read four Hungerford winners through (Crush, The World Waiting to be Made, Jacob’s Air and The Fur) and I had four to go. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get past the first chapter of A Whispering of Fish. The less said about this the better.

The House of Breathing – Gail Jones

I haven’t given this book much of a chance, I suppose. I read the first story and tried to read the second. This was the Hungerford winner in 1991. I found the tone of the stories to be too scholarly and detached for my liking. That’s my loss, I guess.

Sixty Lights – Gail Jones

I don’t know why I stopped reading this. I loved the first 60 pages or so, but then I kept putting it down. Again, and again, and again. I gave up at around page 100. This is interesting, because I actually agree with the consensus opinion that Gail Jones is an extremely gifted writer. Jones writes in such a way that images are more important than narrative. A sort of a-linear progression perhaps. As a consequence, this was too amorphous for my liking. That’s a shame, because I’m sure it’s me who is missing out. I will try to read this again in the not-too-distant.

This leads to wonder why it is that I couldn’t get through the above books, all of which have won major awards. In the case of Gail Jones, I think it’s simply a matter of taste. Jones’ method is cool, subtle, even detached. I don’t respond well to that. I wasn’t a great fan of Brenda Walker’s Crush for a similar reason. I would rather read novels with sledgehammer type narratives, such as McGahan’s Praise or van Loon’s Road Story, even if the subject matter doesn’t particularly interest me (Road Story) or is repulsive (Praise). This demonstrates that my own reading preference is for narrative over image, or perhaps time over space. I shall consider this further.

Book Review – Kingdom Come by J. G. Ballard

Ballard has been on a long decline for decades now. Since the heady days of his seminal The Atrocity Exhibition, as well as arguably his best novels in High Rise and The Unlimited Dream Company, Ballard’s novels have been deteriorating almost imperceptibly. Perhaps this is somewhat unfair, but it’s how I feel. J. G. Ballard is one of the most important fantasists of the twentieth century, but his last important novel was Empire of the Sun, and that was published more than twenty years ago. The novels after Empire are of middling quality (The Day of Creation, Rushing to Paradise and The Kindness of Women, as well as the excellent novella Running Wild). But his work since then has been poor.

Ballard’s last four novels are often thought of as a thematic quartet, in that they all address the psychopathology of modern life. They are Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come. I can’t comment on the Millennium People, because I haven’t read it, but the other three are middling at best. Unfortunately, Ballard has made the mistake of many a successful writer before him: he has continued writing well into his seventies, even though he has long finished saying everything he ever wanted to say in fiction. And thus his books are repetitive and ’samey,’ almost to the point of self-parody. But nobody is laughing in Kingdom Come.

It’s not that bad a book, really. If someone else had written it, it would be dismissed as a not-too-successful attempt to imagine the suburban upheavals of the future. It’s only that it has the name ‘J. G. Ballard’ on it that anyone has paid attention to what is basically a lightweight thriller. It’s about a grassroots, sports-loving, racist, St George shirt-wearing, consumerist revolution in the Heathrow Airport area of England. The protagonist, a forty-something ad man named Richard Pearson, comes into this area to investigate the murder of his elderly father at the Metro-Centre, a colossal shopping centre that inhabits the literal and emotional centre of this novel.

Characters were never exactly Ballard’s strength (consider the stereotypical and outdated characters in otherwise excellent novels like The Drowned World and The Crystal World), but now all his characters are cut from the same cloth as the book before, and the book before that. I can’t be bothered remembering the names of the key characters in Kingdom Come, as they aren’t especially memorable. We have: the strong but nervous lady doctor; the friendly and yet threatening psychologist; the enigmatic and authoritative shopping centre manager; the unstable and cryptic criminal mind; and the affable and vacuous television personality. And the plot, for the first half of the novel, basically consists of Pearson being shunted from one major character to another for an extended conversation, for no apparent reason other than that Ballard wanted these characters to speak in his novel. The plot is thin, but it does improve a little in the second half.

Unfortunately, Ballard has covered this material before. Kingdom Come main event, which consists of a hostage situation in the Metro Centre, echoes Ballard’s earlier Concrete Island and High Rise. The novel’s thesis is new, I suppose: that consumerism will eventually lead to fascism, and in turn to madness, but it isn’t very interesting or well argued. I read an recent interview with Ballard the other day in which he said that some of his recent novels were in fact extended short stories, and this is certainly true of Kingdom Come. This would probably work well at novella length, jettisoning the entire first section, but Ballard knows what his market is, and that is for novels.

Sadly, Ballard now has terminal prostate cancer, and at seventy-eight, needless to say, the prognosis is poor. He’s had a magnificent career, one that just about any writer should be envious of (I certainly am), but it’s all over now. The James Graham Ballard I will choose to remember will be the younger man who wrote stories like “The Voices of Time” and “The Drowned Giant,” as well as the aformentioned novels. Ballard is a giant of twentieth century literature, and he will be remembered for a long, long time. But it won’t be for what will probably end up being his last novel, Kingdom Come.

Book Review – The Fur by Nathan Hobby

I actually read The Fur about four months ago, but because I had yet to crank up my blog at that stage, I never got around to reviewing it. Here, then, is my belated review of Nathan Hobby’s first novel, which won the TAG Hungerford Award in 2002.

The first thing to be said is that I ripped through this in about four hours. I’m sure that must be annoying – to spend years working on something that can be consumed in one afternoon and evening – but there it is. I am making a habit of binging on books lately, and The Fur was no exception. It’s about a young man by the name of Michael Sullivan, living with his parent/s in the W.A. locales of Collie, Bunbury and finally near Murdoch University. So this is a familiar terrain for W.A. readers.

Only it isn’t familiar at all. The central idea of the The Fur is, well, the fur. What is it? Who can say? The fur is some kind of fungal growth that covers everything from houses, windows to parts of people’s bodies. It’s not exactly malignant, but it’s inconvenient all the same. As a result, most of W.A. has been quarantined by the ‘Wealth, which is an ironic and apt contraction of Commonwealth. The Wealth, with the help of the UN, has rendered W.A. as some kind of exclusion zone. This reminds me of the ‘Zone’ around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine. So this is something of a science fiction narrative, and an alternate history at that: it seems that the fur first struck during the 1970s. And yet, in this alternate world, the Smashing Pumpkins still managed to release their album ‘Mellencollie and the Infinite Sadness.’ W.A., Hobby seems to be saying, is utterly insignificant to the rest of the world. Unless, of course, you happen to be living in it.

Michael Sullivan is at the crossroads of many things: school, love, family, and faith. All of these things impact upon him in the course of The Fur. Schoolwise, this is a familiar tale of trying to get through the TEE, which echoes nothing if not Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi. In matters of the the heart, Michael is afflicted by his affection for a series of young women, the most significant of whom is Rebecca. In terms of family, Michael has to deal with the death of his mother and moving away from his father’s home. Finally, Michael must contend with a number of theological questions in relation to his Christian faith. In short, there’s a lot on Michael’s plate in The Fur.

As I touched on before, the science fictional elements of this story are backgrounded. There is no attempt to bring them into focus. This works surprisingly well, despite the fact that the nature of the fur itself is a massive unsolved mystery. What this story is really about is the need for acceptance, the need to grow apart from one’s parents, and the need for love. These are all basic human drives, and thus Michael Sullivan is something of an everyman. This is a book about growing up, and the harsh lessons that one learns along the way.

When I said there were harsh lessons to be learned in (and from) The Fur, I meant it. There are no happy endings here. In a sense, nothing is resolved. One aspect I found frustrating was Hobby’s practice of unfolding plot-lines, only for them to shrivel and die before flowering (so to speak). In one episode, Michael and Rebecca plan to escape to Melbourne by way of a volleyball competition. This section is where The Fur seems most conventional, as Michael saves money for a false ID by working for an importer. There is even a scene in which he drinks the highly coveted and expensive Coca Cola. But the volleyball narrative drops away, and Michael moves on. This might be more realistic – for what is life but a series of disjointed and incomplete narratives? – but it is hard on the reader nonetheless.

And thus The Fur is ultimately about frustration. Sexual frustration, familial frustration, and existential frustration. We can feel Michael’s dis-ease, his restlessness. At times The Fur can be a confronting read. But it not an unrewarding one. One hopes that Hobby can build on this early success (he completed this novel at twenty years of age) in subsequent books. From what I’ve read of his thus-far unpublished second novel, The House of Zealots, further improvement seems likely.