Nothing is more guaranteed to shoot an arrow of despair through the skull of an embittered, cynical critic, prejudicing all subsequent comment, than an absurd and portentous title, especially one that seems over-laden with the buzz-words of critical theory and to be collapsing under the weight of facile wordplay. You might think that there were only so many sub-Derridean, metafictional, psychosexual, gender-bending, cryptological, feminist cyber-thrillers possible in this one small world, but, oh, my friend, you have not walked the edge of the abyss.
So, on being handed this three-part novel to review by French-Greek writer, Kirios Quebec, my hand strayed longingly over the cyanide capsules in my drawer and my old school tie before tightening round my grandfather’s old second world war pistol, hidden as ever behind the moose’s head in the hallway. Its metal weighed heavy in my hands and my mind as I threw it carelessly from left to right. Tempting as it was to end an existence made wearisome by an excess of predictable postmodern novels, it struck me as a much better idea to terminate the contract with breathing of the incorrigible cobble-headed baboon who actually forces me to confront these crimes against sanity on a monthly basis – none other than my editor, the satanic, sadistic, Slavo-Teutonic slave-driver, Georgy Riecke.
My thoughts worked thus: Herr Riecke may be the founder, editor and general leading light of both Europe’s premier magazine for obscure, experimental and intellectually avant-garde art, literature and philosophy, Underneath The Bunker, and of the associated publishing house, Upside-Down Then Backwards (so called because of the gymnastic reading strategy required if one is to gain the optimal meaning from most of its published works), he may personally claim responsibility for inspiring herds of one-armed schizophrenic shepherds from the Urals to pen their xenophobic odes to manure in stream-of-consciousness free verse, but if you ask me his supposed life in hiding after a few surreal threats from that Bosnian trickster Hoçe is nothing more than a pathetic excuse for an inability to drag himself out of bed for anything other than an orgiastic literary launch. While he suns himself in an obsolete village just outside Vladivostock, he inevitably lumbers his staff with more and more onerous work such that breaking point is only a trigger finger away.
This torrential tirade was bursting the banks of my anger as I held Quebec’s novel in my hand; I was on the point of packing my winter furs, brushing the dust off my Russian dictionary and warning my wife not to expect me back for supper that day, when it occurred to me that I was perhaps misjudging a book by its title and it would be foolish to commit homicide for the sake of an unread novel.
So, one notch under a murderous rage, I began to read.
It started well. I may have been expecting Lacanian, incomprehensible language, babbled mutterings of a free-playing signifier and polymorphous sexual perversity with robots and so prepared to welcome any writing which made straightforward human sense, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the first chapter. Perhaps its black humour merely fitted the mood I was in, but soon I was crying with laughter. You may wonder what can have so transformed my homicidal impulses into a flowering of pure joy but that would be to misread what actually happened: rather than being diluted, my thirst for murder was merely redirected by Quebec to stunning effect.
In order to clarify this, it is perhaps necessary to quote the opening page of the novel in its entirety:
Reappraising Perversity, Reinventing Hope, Relocating Life – Instructions for Use
Before reading this novel it is essential that the reader equip him or herself with a sharp knife – my own preference is for one of those curved machetes so useful for chopping watermelon and coconuts, but the reader may select any cutting implement that comes to hand except a Swiss Army Knife – we certainly don’t want any neutrality in the appreciation of this novel and when was the last time a pair of tweezers was used in a violent context?
The protagonist of this novel is an irredeemable fool who deserves to die and then to be forgotten forever by history, so in order to hasten his untimely demise, the reader must participate in his eradication from these pages by taking their knife and slashing out his name whenever they see it written. Don’t worry about the words underneath that you might be missing, there are plenty more where they’ve come from, just stab away at his flesh made word. So, whenever you see the name Gregory Wreck, show him no mercy, offer him no pity but kill, kill, kill.
You might, of course, be wondering quite what young Gregory has done to deserve my psychopathic exhortations: all will perhaps become clear, but for now it is imperative that you follow my instructions to the letter – I certainly don’t want any stray ‘G’s or ‘k’s hanging around once you’ve finished.
Depending on how aggressive you are with your knife, by the time you have put an end to Gregory, there may, perhaps, be no novel left to speak of – well, if that’s the case, so much the better – it certainly won’t harm my sales if nobody is able to lend the book around after a first reading. But if you are still tediously hankering after something so passé as a narrative thread well, listen up and listen good, you miserable, moronic worm of a reader.
This novel is a three-part bildungsroman concerning the development of Gregory Wreck, an irrepressibly optimistic and morally upright character, who has a blameless childhood, a blemish-free private life and a superbly successful career in high finance, which he supplements by writing well-constructed novels in the insipid genre of social comedy, in which the hero always gets the girl. Needless to say he makes a vulgar profit. So far, so sickening. However, it is narrated by a misanthropic persona called only ‘You’, whose aims (continuously frustrated) are to corrupt the hitherto pure and chaste Gregory into an act of shocking perversity, to reorient his sunny disposition into a bleak pessimism and to murder him in cold blood. Anyone who cannot see how this relates to my title is too stupid to read my novel, so kindly give up now or I shall hunt you down mercilessly.
The whodunit is a redundant genre – I thus inaugurate the era of the youdunit.
(Kirios Quebec, 2003)
Given my still burning rage, this call to arms against a disgustingly successful man with a name strikingly similar to Riecke’s was a welcome tonic and probably helped maintain his middle-aged, middle-European good looks. As Quebec predicted the narrator duly hated Gregory and much of the novel consisted of free-flowing invective against him, the words pouring like hot tar down its white pages. Moreover, Quebec had been right in pointing out that the slow butchering of the novel at the hands of my sharpest kitchen knife and the subsequent loss of words did not really detract from the meaning I was able to gain from it. Indeed, one could argue that they enhanced the experience as, keen though I was to wallow in the mud of sustained vitriol, the lacunae within the text at least gave me the chance to come to the surface for air.
The faint-hearted amongst you might wonder whether the reading of such a river of insults can be either a rewarding experience or of any literary merit, but to those mutilated mullet-brained mules I would merely quote a paragraph of Quebec’s narrator right back at them:
Oh that the world could be rid of all muttonous mutinous muddle-headed mutants such as that his brains could be peeled like a banana to reveal the monolithic monkey within that jugglers could entice out of his scabrous eyes twisting them sideways like they might spin a snooker ball bang in the pocket and out of his sockets that he might swim in a lake of sulphur so far out from the shore that he would dr and sink in the stink of his ins so at least we who are left could see and see honestly the wreck of the world all battered to fit some absurd little pattern which doesn’t exist as it’s chaos it’s chaos it’s chaos always
Certainly not a light-hearted comedy of social mores, I’ll agree with that, but any intelligent reader will see that it follows in the great scatological, materialist and sceptical tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Joyce, Runačzek and Ek, criticising as it seems to do the excessive optimism of those who subscribe to the view that the world runs to some kind of grand plan or pattern beyond our physical form.
Indeed, once one can begin to discern a plot other than insults in Quebec’s work, it appears that the narrator’s hatred for Gregory Wreck is not mere misanthropism but a planned attack against what he views as a false philosophy, a desire to demonstrate that any belief in a higher order or any attempt at organising this world into comprehensible units is an infantile illusion. Thus, the narrator’s three-fold attack on sexual purity, high-minded philosophical optimism and the desire to live could be seen as an attempt to subvert three areas of our lives where we try to assert some semblance of order.
Of course, not believing in order or organisation means plans are sacrilegious, leading to the lengthy and frequently hilarious plot. Since he refuses to think ahead, whenever the narrator approaches Gregory Wreck either to corrupt his innocent mind by, say, waggling his naked bottom in front of him as he addresses a board meeting, or to depress him utterly by reciting the awful love poetry of some sixth-form pupil, or to end his life by attacking him with a sharpened carrot (it was the nearest thing to hand when the impulse struck him), he merely succeeds in not being noticed, getting arrested or eliciting an uninterested sigh of slight surprise, leading, of course, to yet more vitriolic insults and further failed attempts at intervention in Wreck’s life.
Quebec’s novel romps on in this vein for several hundred pages but is never less than fully entertaining. However, eventually, as the reader continues to slash dramatically away at the mention of Wreck’s name, the novel becomes harder and harder to read, dwindling in the last forty pages or so to isolated words wherein it is impossible to make out any intelligible plot, such that any desire on the part of the reader to know whether the narrator succeeded in his murderous caprices or whether Wreck escaped unscathed is terminally frustrated.
On my first stab at reading this novel I must confess that, much as I had found it cathartic to take my revenge on the very medium which has been my torment these last few years, I actually found the destruction of words a bit of a gimmick and wondered quite what his point was. Fortunately, however, scarcely a day after reading the novel, with my deadline for the review hanging menacingly a week in advance (Riecke doesn’t half crack the whip), I fortuitously bumped into a friend and fellow critic who was a bit of an expert on Quebec (I have to admit that, up till this novel landed with a heavy bump through my letter-box, I had never even heard of him) and was able to give me a few hints as to Quebec’s possible purpose in creating such a tattered ending to his novel.
It seems that this friend of mine met Quebec lying face down in horse manure whilst he was staying with an uncle of his in Upper Silesia. He had neither been aware of his uncle’s enthusiasm for experimental novelists nor of Quebec’s propensity for engaging in what he could only believe was a particularly bizarre form of self-flagellation, but knew that he had to take advantage of this moment to ask Quebec a question about his work that had always bothered him. Bending low and speaking, for some reason, in a whisper he asked why it was that all Quebec’s novels were of great length and yet all seemed to dispense with traditional features of the novel.
‘Because, you globular pustule on the face of a monkey,’ the answer came roaring back, ‘I am attempting nothing less than the absolute destruction of that disgusting literary form called the novel! Now kindly clear off while I try to grow some thorns!’
This same friend, though he had burned all of the copies of Quebec’s work in disgust, was then able to relate to me the plots, if you could call them that, of Quebec’s other novels. Once he had told me about the crime thriller with transparent pages so that you could see who the culprit was long before the crime had been committed, the love story which stops in the middle of the first sexual encounter and has two hundred more pages inviting the reader to finish the story and bring it to some suitable climax, the roman à fleuve which, after two hundred pages of being a family saga suddenly begins to read like a dictionary, giving definitions for each act a character makes, the first person account of the Great Plague which consists of the detailed minutiae of two weeks in the life of Daniel Defie amounting to two thousand extraordinarily tedious pages and the horror story which consists of variations on an opening in a storm, all ending abruptly before the end of the page and all scrunched up inside a bin; once he had told me about these extraordinary acts of literary experimentation, it struck me like a violently swung mallet exactly what Quebec might be meaning to convey with his aborted novel and to consider with renewed awe the destroyed work in front of me.
With considerable daring, what Quebec has persuaded the reader to embark on is the murder of the novel that he has written, an act which is entirely in accordance with the philosophical standpoint of its narrator and, I surmise, its creator. In other words, if Quebec, through his narrator, wants us to believe that any attempt to bring order and pattern to the untidiness of the world is false, then the novel with its expositions and climaxes and resolution is the most illusory pattern of them all and must be destroyed to return us to a more honest and healthy acceptance of the residual chaos and bleak meaninglessness of what we have the temerity to call life, where we can no more understand the half-formed and half-experienced words, images and sensations around us than a mountain goat can understand quantum physics by chewing on the works of Stephen Hawking.
After a lifetime of puzzling over implausible, monotonous tomes on the mendacious nature of patriarchal power structures and tediously existential narratives banging endlessly on about the search for meaning and authenticity and a framework for a morality without recourse to God, what a joy it was to finally find a novel which admitted what most of them proved all along: that there is no point or meaning to any of their babbled mutterings.
I am weak-kneed with admiration for a man who can so fearlessly look the chaotic world in the face and so wilfully encourage the desecration of his own art-form. Kirios Quebec has ushered in a new era of the novel, moving beyond stale academic and theoretical formulae and passive experience of a narrative on the part of the reader to a daring enactment of the ultimate anti-novel, forcing us to abandon reassuring and escapist fictional patterning for the naked and sprawled experience of real life. Having been subject to Riecke’s tyranny of pretentious fiction for far too long I can only salute such an assault on the novel: let us put down our pens and pick up our knives, let’s run all novels through and set ourselves free. Or, as the final page of Quebec’s novel puts it:
under backwards
I wander
my knife drawn
ink split
blood
dead books best
then I can
sleep
Review by Tor Borsen
Further Reading:
