Caught in the Headlights

Don’t get me wrong, I really like Nick Cave’s music. I just don’t think he’s quite managed to become a novelist yet. His first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, was published around twenty years ago, and was so self-consciously verbose and writerly that when I read it I spent half of my time reaching for the dictionary. He has mercifully overcome this tendency with his more recent work, The Death of Bunny Munro.

Unfortunately, that is one of the book’s few redeeming features. Here is my main problem with it: it is utterly obscene. I’m not a particularly prudish person, but there was just too much sex and swearing in there. And more to the point, it seemed to me that the near-constant sex in Bunny Munro did virtually nothing for the plot. Ok, Bunny is clearly a sex addict and that is an important part of the story, but that was successfully established after a couple of lurid chapters. Is it really necessary to reiterate it in every other paragraph?

Obviously I can’t go into too much detail because my mother reads this blog (Hi Mum!) but you’d be amazed at how many times the word ‘tumescent’ um, came up in this novel.

So, any other problems? Well, it was also a massively over-hyped novel. I suppose this is fairly inevitable with a ‘celebrity’ author, but the reviews were fawning and I’m inclined to think that the book’s status as a bestseller is due to the legions of fans of Cave’s music. People, in fact, just like me. Fortunately my brother bought me this book for Christmas, so I dodged a bullet there.

There are times in the novel when Cave the songwriter makes himself known, and these provide some welcome relief. Bunny’s redemption scene – which incidentally appears out of nowhere in terms of plot – is written with the kind of Old Testament richness for which Cave is rightly known. This was what he excelled at in his previous novel, discussing evil, damnation and salvation in heavy tones that call to mind William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, and the whole Southern Gothic gang. Sweating buckets of blood under the hot red stagelights, Bunny asks forgiveness from all those he has wronged. In my view, it’s an ending that redeems the novel as a whole, not just the protagonist.

Other enjoyable aspects include the misguided sense of hero-worship that Bunny Junior has for his father. The relationship between them is tender, and Bunny clearly does care for his son, but this becomes irritating as Bunny’s catalogue of disgraceful acts continues to grow and his son’s attitude doesn’t change. Of course, it’s better to be irritated by an author than completely unmoved, and Bunny Junior is very useful as a sympathetic character without whom the novel would be, well, fairly unlikeable.

So, Cave the novelist is almost there. He was overeducated and tried too hard in his first novel and is lewd and crude for no particular purpose in his second. What he has always done well is misery and transgression, but I think he has yet to pitch it as well in a novel as he does in song.

And my other piece of advice, Nick, just for the record, is to lose the moustache.

The Pilgrim's Tale

There was an almost universal reaction in the house when I slapped down a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five on the arm of the sofa, and it went something like this: ‘Ooh, Slaughterhouse-Five!’ Everyone vaguely knows what it’s about – the destruction of Dresden, nominally – and everyone (including me) is vaguely aware of a nagging sense that they Should Have Read It By Now. It has also been on various English Lit syllabuses for a few years, which I think compounds the feeling of schoolboy guilt.

I said I vaguely knew what it was about, but I was surprised by just how little Dresden features in the story. The book has a conversational tone and a first-person introduction, which feels a bit like you’re being addressed by a grown up version of Holden Caulfield. Throughout Vonnegut’s prose there is a vein of laconic, sardonic wit which allows the reader to progress through the wretched life of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, without becoming utterly miserable. Billy is absurdly tall, skinny, clumsy, fragile and utterly detached from the real world, but he has a ‘tremendous wang’ and ends up impregnating a famous movie starlet. So it goes.

‘So it goes’ is the narrator’s catch-all philosophy throughout. It is derived from Billy’s travels to the planet Tralfamadore (I told you it wasn’t really about Dresden) and his encounters with an alien species who see all instances of time simultaneously, in the same way that we can look across a landscape. What happens in any particular moment is unavoidable; we are all like flies trapped in amber.

And this is true most of all for Billy Pilgrim. He is shunted along from time and place to time and place, not unwillingly, but certainly not of his own free will. He tumbles through the plot just like Joe Christmas does in Faulkner’s Light in August. I think Billy’s name perfectly encompasses this as well. He is a pilgrim, bumbling along through life in an extraordinary way. His father tells him to call himself Billy, not any other variant of William, because there is something magic about the name. It certainly has a Peter Pan quality, somewhere between an ordinary kid playing in the suburbs and an all-American action hero. Billy Pilgrim. The ordinary American boy, the optometrist-turned-chaplain’s-assistant, as comically unsuited to war as he is to life in general. Billy Pilgrim, victim of, well, everything.

My main criticism of Slaughterhouse-Five would be the abrupt way in which the novel ends. For a book which everybody thinks is about Dresden, it spends a long time getting there and very little time in that charred, otherworldly landscape. Perhaps the point is that the reader is shunted around the place just like the protagonist. Billy’s journey is far from linear, but fortunately Vonnegut’s repetitive use of language is a useful crutch. Familiar themes surface and re-surface in peace and war alike, from simple descriptive phrases to the sinister opalescence of wartime candles made from the rendered fat of human beings. This repetition is paradoxically both reassuring and disorientating. We share Billy’s disconcerting journey until one morning the war ends, and so does the book. And although the ending of the novel is abrupt, it happens exactly as the narrator tells us it will in the first chapter, which is in itself is a baffling experience. So it goes.

As I Lay Reading

This is just a brief post-mortem on William Faulkner’s Light in August. One or two other matters seem to have got in the way lately. 

 

Overall, I’m glad to have read it, as it was considerably better than As I Lay Dying. But I’m also glad to have finished it. Faulkner’s reputation for verbose and exhausting prose is well earned, and although I was complimentary about the first half of the book, it soon began to drag. 

 

One particularly annoying feature of the novel, and one that I certainly didn’t expect from someone accepted as a masterful storyteller, was the clumsiness with which Faulkner kept introducing new characters. ‘At that time there was X, who had lived in the town for Y years...’ This happened several times, and was so formulaic and cumbersome that I almost suspected that Faulkner had run out of storyline and was introducing new characters in order to coax the plot along for a few more pages.

 

It is easy to see how Faulkner earned his title as one of the great American novelists, and it is equally obvious that he has shaped whole generations of authors. His metaphors are vast and captivating, his language poetic and sinister. For me, the problem is that some of his modern protégés seem superior. If I want to see blood spilled in the Deep South, I’ll turn to Cormac McCarthy, an author whose style and use of language owe so much to Faulkner, but who is far more accessible to the modern reader. He doesn’t have the lulls that Faulkner has.

 

Perhaps fast-paced modern literature has spoiled me, although I am still happy to trudge through classics like Don Quixote and Moby-Dick. I think Faulkner’s major problem is that legions of writers have come after him in the Southern Gothic tradition, and the style that was so uniquely his is now readily available elsewhere. He may have been original then, but he is not unique now. And although he writes with incredible power, his voice is lost among those of his imitators. Faulkner has been a victim of his own success.

Danger on the Edge of Town

Last time I had a tussle with Faulkner, he won. I still finished As I Lay Dying, because I couldn’t bear not to, but it was an incredibly tedious process and I didn’t enjoy the book. Happily, Light in August, which I’m now about halfway through, is a much more gripping read.

As you might expect from Faulkner, this novel sits slap bang in the middle of the Southern Gothic genre of which its author is one of the chief architects. In nineteenth-century Mississippi, a man named Christmas struggles with his own identity and free will. He is part black, with all the stigma attached to that, but not such a large part that anyone can immediately tell. He is despised by the whites who know his secret and rejected by the blacks.

Christmas is trapped by his blood and his upbringing. In a masterful flashback, Faulkner reveals the cold, puritanical foster-father and the young man’s inevitable violent reaction. Beaten daily for not learning his catechisms, the young Christmas becomes imbued with his foster-father’s disdain for women and icy capacity for violence.

Faulkner’s genius lies in his ability to create a brooding, pervasive sense of impending disaster. Christmas’ upbringing inevitably shows itself, and the reader bobs along just as helplessly as the protagonist. It seems very likely that there will be no escape for either. The book is claustrophobic, despite the vast open spaces of the Deep South; and the limitless potential of a young country is arrested by the furtive, sweaty dealings of the town of Jefferson.

At the end of the flashback, Faulkner is at his haunting best: the outcast Christmas is a man and a parricide by the age of eighteen. He wanders a single dusty road that stretches through countless towns and cities and fifteen years of whorehouses and fistfights. After all we have learned about Christmas in an incredibly detailed flashback, the fifteen years of wandering between the novel’s past and its present lasts for a breathtaking page or so. It’s not what he’s known for, but at times Faulkner can be an extraordinarily economical storyteller. Christmas is propelled into the future by some terrible, unseen force, and all one can do is keep turning the pages.