Crime, Punishment and Occasional Bewilderment

Well, cross that one off the bucket list. Finally. Last night I finished reading Crime and Punishment. It's taken a while, and I had to read two other books in the middle of it for a rest. It's not that Dostoyevsky's prose is denser and less accessible than that of any other 19^th Century author – what really got me were the names. Allow me to explain.

The crime in question is committed by the splendidly alliterative Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikoff (this is not a spoiler – the dramatis personae lists him as 'Student and Murderer'). Raskolnikoff kills an old moneylender and her sister in what initially appears to be a fairly amateurish robbery, and Dostoyevsky charts his consequent mental disintegration amidst a colourful cast of people with irritatingly similar names.

Perhaps I just haven't read enough Russian literature, but I found it difficult to keep track of Peter Petrovitch, Porphyrius Petrovitch and Elia Petrovitch (none of whom are related). The fact that some characters are known by as many as three different names or diminutives - I'm looking at you, Eudoxia/Dounia/Dounetchka - doesn't help either.

Once these minor hurdles are negotiated, C&P reveals itself as an intensely harrowing and human account of Raskolnikoff's encroaching insanity, and of the disastrous effects it has on his doting sister and mother. The crime takes place early in the narrative and is foreseen in a way that calls to mind the 'murderee' in Martin Amis' London Fields. The official 'punishment' is more or less an epilogue - Raskolnikoff's restless mind provides more punishment than any Siberian labour camp.

Eventually it emerges that Raskolnikoff isn't being driven mad purely by remorse or fear of capture. The student committed his crime to test an academic hypothesis, to see if he could join Napoleon amid the ranks of the übermenschen, to see if he could reject society's conventions and act purely in his own interests, even to the point of murder. Clearly, Raskolnikoff is not that kind of person, and he becomes increasingly exasperated by his own weakness and the fact that, in trying and failing to be like Napoleon, he has ruined himself.

With a beard like that, who needs happiness?

To me, this was the most interesting aspect of C&P and yet it seemed like an underdeveloped sub-plot. Amid the misery and suffering which Dostoyevsky does so well, I would have liked to see more of this Borgesian idea of taking an intellectual curiosity to its monstrous extreme.

Other plot strands include alcoholic fathers, consumptive widows, misogynistic fiancées, starving children and the ubiquitous tart-with-a-heart, who follows the doomed Raskolnikoff almost literally to the ends of the earth. These threads are drawn together with breathtaking skill, although you might find yourself leafing backwards once in a while to remind yourself who on earth all these people are.

On the plus side Dostoyevsky's dialogue is remarkably accessible to the modern reader, particularly Raskolnikoff's feverish internal ruminations. His emotional turmoil is conveyed without apparent effort and the reader's empathy for the murderer is truly poignant. I've never murdered anyone, but now I know exactly what it feels like.

In short, C&P is a horrifying romp through a Dickensian carnival of human misery. There is, mercifully, a glimmer of redemption at the end of the trans-Siberian tunnel, but this certainly isn't a book for the faint-hearted.

Back to Reality

I’m now about two-thirds of the way through The Book of Dave, despite the best efforts of the man on the train who kept almost falling asleep onto me. I’m really enjoying the book, and I would highly recommend it. Yes, it’s bleak and miserable, but it is also incredibly readable. The two parallel worlds reel you in, as each one gives you just a little more background on the other. It’s very well done.

As we witness the deranged cabbie, Dave Rudman, construct his own universe and system of beliefs, it becomes apparent just how fragile any such system is. One of my favourite words from the book’s bizarre vocabulary is ‘toyist’ – essentially it means that something is phoney or ersatz. Dave deploys this word regularly against anything he particularly dislikes, branding the subject false and invalid. This leads to intriguing clashes between the reader’s reality and the very persuasive reality which Will Self constructs. The humble pig, recognisable to us, is monstrous and ‘toyist’ to the inhabitants of the future island of Ham, because it cannot talk. Their livestock, in contrast, are initially grotesque but eventually endearing. They are the shambling, lisping motos which belong somewhere between a pig and a giant baby, and who vacuously but cheerfully greet their masters with an ‘orlri mayt’ even as they are being led to slaughter.

To the pig-farmers, the motos are vile and toyist beasts. To the inhabitants of Ham, the pigs are poor toyist copies of the motos, bereft of the power of speech. We should sympathise with the former, but we do not, because the novel works.

I’m sure this is all very poorly-explained and confusing. The main point I wanted to get at is that the word toyist is a well-executed, made-up word for something that we all do all of the time. It is a way of dismissing someone else’s reality if it does not accord with your own.

I’ve already started to adopt a few pieces of Self’s misanthropic vocabulary. It is impossible not to. The fragments of shattered glass from a car window are ‘ackney diamonds. A bloke who talks a load of rubbish has more f**king rabbit than Watership Down. In a similar vein to the adjective ‘toyist’, we see the invention of ‘chellish’ – that is, someone or something bearing a resemblance to Dave’s ex-wife Michelle, and being laden with all the bleak emotions that she evokes for our protagonist.

So, the creation of a vocabulary is a very powerful thing. It imprints Dave’s hate-filled psyche onto the reader, and it does it forcibly. Since we have only Dave’s words through which to understand the situation, we are forced to accept a landscape saturated with impotent rage. This is toyist, that is chellish, this is phoney, that is hateful.

In the same way that calling something toyist forces the namer’s perception of reality onto the named object, Dave’s inescapable vocabulary forces his twisted perceptions onto the reader.

Phew.

The Book of Dave does what I like in a novel, it plays with reality. And it does it very well.