Waiting for Godalming
By Robert Rankin
Corgi, 2001
There is no way on Earth I would ever consciously choose to read this book or any book like it. But, when a very attractive and intelligent woman, only minutes after giving some of the best oral sex a man will ever have in his life, says, “Will you read this book?” the correct answer is “Yes.” Because I’m a bogan. So I read it.
It belongs to a very very nerdy corner of the book world that I label ‘Comic fantasy’. It's a genre as alien to me as Nicaraguan Modern Jazz. Now, coming from a diet of miserable European 19th century realist novelists as I do, I tend to avoid any novel in the ‘comic’ or ‘fantasy’ section of a bookstore. This one is both, so it’s a double whammy, but like I said, the chick was hot.
Every single fucking line of the book was ‘funny’. As the very attractive and intelligent woman put it, “Like ‘Flying High’”. That’s not to say I laughed at every line. In fact, I only laughed at about five lines. The humour comes at a cracking pace, so much so that Rankin lets the storyline, complex as it is, degenerate to the point of irrelevancy.
This book is about the gags, not the story, though the story is quite loaded. It includes a ghost-seeing machine, the murder of God (who looks like Richard E. Grant), evil hairdressers, Devils on the Earth, God’s illegitimate children, insurance fraud, Jewish virgins, an ongoing satirical dig at cliché-driven spy thrillers and lots of London cabbie in-jokes.
It’s somewhere between ‘Flying High’ and ‘Carry On Heaven’.
Rankin has an audience. He must do, there’s heaps of his books available, and I can see why people like him. He’s harmless. He’s funny. He’s cute. He’s lighter than a feather, and you can read his book on a plane or in the never-never land of ‘almost asleep but I’ll just finish this chapter’.
The jokes slide over the reader with ease. Thinking is optional. For example:
Fangio seemed lost for words. ‘I’m lost for words,’ he said.
You got it? That’s the gag. And they’re everywhere.
Here’s another one that features heavily; the gag where Rankin gives an insight into his writing process.
But let us now return to Icarus Smith, who is about to have a little action. A great deal of action, as it happens.
But no.
Wait.
Let us not return to Icarus just yet. Let us instead return to Lazlo Woodbine...
“Hahahahahaha! Hilarious. The writer is inviting us into his process of structuring the narrative, but here’s his genius: He actually does know what he’s doing but he just pretends he doesn’t for the sake of the gag! Hahahahahahah!”
Whatever.
Sigh.
The best scenes were the ones involving the detective who referred to ‘dames’ and wore a trenchcoat. He insisted on his life being a cliché, even insisting that the book ends with a shootout on a rooftop. He made me smirk on occasion.
My biggest laugh was his description of his favourite pub; a ‘proper’ pub...
It served proper flat ale in proper dirty glasses. Had proper full ashtrays... There was proper unswept lino on the floor and proper unmopped vomit in the gents. There was a proper one man band called Johnny G who performed there on a Tuesday night. And proper drunken louts who threw proper light ale bottles at him when he did.
Well, maybe it’s not that funny after all. I did giggle a few times through the book, but really, I was mainly waiting for it to end. The last four chapters were shit.
The shame of it all is that the storyline, fractured as it was, could have been more gripping if he could have just toned down on the constant gags. Sometimes, situations are funny enough that they don’t need to be sullied by a cheap wordplay, or another joke that was the same as the four on the page before it.
Having said that, it would make for a funny movie. And that’s where a story like this belongs – on a screen. Not on a bookshelf.
All in all, it was okay. I suppose. Maybe a bit less than okay. It gave me something to do.
I give it a C Minus.
And now that I've just finished one absurdist comic fantasy, on to another absurdist comic fantasy... the second half of Genesis.
Wednesday, 10 October 2007
Tuesday, 18 September 2007
Genesis: 1-25
The First Book of Moses, called Genesis
By author unknown.
(King James Version, Penguin Publication of 2006)
I’ve decided to read The Holy Bible so you don’t have to. I will review every chapter, start to finish, both old and new testaments. It may take years, and I’m only going to read each ‘book’ every second book I read.
In the case of Genesis, the first book, I had to stop after 25 chapters because it was doing my head in. So, this entry is only for the first 25 chapters. I’m going to read and review a normal novel next, then I’ll do the next 25 chapters of Genesis.
Chapter One
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Genesis 1:1-3
That’s the thing about the King James version: it’s written exquisitely. I have no idea why anybody would bother reading any other ‘modern’ version because bloody hell, they’re just shit. They leave out all the poetry and what remains is the rubble of poetry, cheapening the ‘message’, rendering it an un-inspiring cult.
In Chapter One, God creates everything in six days and then takes a day off, thus giving launch to the labour movement.
The fact He made the world in less than a week is considered by several million mentally ill people to be scientific fact. They even have a name for it: Genesis Science, which is taught as Intelligent Design. These people are morons, and have no appreciation of poetry, or, for that matter, the beauty of the universe.
Chapter Two
Garden of Eden, Adam made in God’s likeness, Adam names every animal (must’ve taken a while, and I’m sure he was getting desperate in the end: “What’s this one do?”, “It eats ants,” “I call it ant-eater”) Eve made from his rib while he was asleep... you know the story. The two of ‘em hang about, shamelessly naked, like most normal husbands and wives.
If the Genesis scientists believe God made everything in six days, they must also believe that Adam named the platypus, even if it ended up only being found on the other side of the world.
Chapter Three
Oops. Trouble in Eden. See, the serpent suggests eating from the forbidden tree, and Eve at first says no because God had forbidden it, and so the serpent says, “Ye shall not surely die. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Genesis 3: 4-5
At this stage, I was yelling out, “Eat it! Otherwise you’re just a sheep, hanging about in a garden, eating all day, achieving nothing.” And thankfully, she ate it, and that’s why I can write book reviews on the internet.
She then gives Adam some Forbidden Fruit, and interestingly, in the King James version, he willingly eats it (I’ve read other newer versions where it is suggested that she kind of convinced him to eat it, but in this translation, taken directly from Ancient Greek, Adam says, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat” Genesis 3: 12).
God gets pissed off, and takes voice and legs away from the serpent. He then creates ‘emnity’ between man and woman, and tells the woman that all women will now have ‘sorrow’ when having children (read: pain) and says that husbands will ‘rule over’ wives. God: The first misogynist. And for every Christian who argues this with me I say: Read the fucking text. It’s what it says. You can’t go on about creation and homosexuality if you can’t also acknowledge these bits.
But here’s the bit I found most interesting in all of Genesis. God says, “...for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”. Genesis 3: 19. In other words, when you die, you return to the ground. No mention of heaven, other than as a place God resides. No mention of being good and getting to heaven. God is clear: You come from dust, you will end up as dust.
If the Genesis Scientists believe that God created everything in six days, they must also believe snakes once talked and had legs.
Adam and Eve are evicted from the Garden of Eden, like streakers at a Test Match.
Chapter Four
Adam and Eve have two kids – Cain and Abel. Cain is a tiller, Abel a shepherd. They decide to make an offering to God. Cain offers some fruit. Abel offers meat. God prefers meat (so why are Adventists vegetarians?), and tells them so. God is clearly a cunt. Sometimes I get presents from two members of my family, but I don’t say, “Oh, I prefer this one to that one”. I thank them both, humbly. But I’m not God.
Cain sooks because God doesn’t like his gift. Then he kills Abel. Man, what a dysfunctional family. God’s first effort at Sims 6000BC sucks.
God is annoyed, so he tells Cain to go walkabout, you know, forever. Cain says, “But I’ll get killed!” (by who though? There’s only your mum and dad left, and surely you can outrun them). God puts a mark on him, so that he can recognise him (?) and to make sure nobody kills him, and if anyone does, they’ll cop revenge. This makes no sense, but fuck, neither do some of the plot twists in Romeo & Juliet, and that’s still a great yarn.
Cain goes to a place called ‘The land of Nod’ and marries someone, which, by logic, must be his sister. Cain, the first incest perpetrator. They have kids who have kids, and even Adam and Eve have another son called Seth. Lots of begetting.
If the Genesis Scientists believe that God created everything in six days, they must also believe the first family were victims/perpetrators of incest.
Chapter Five
Lots of begetting.
Chapter Six
God hates his Sims 6000BC game so much he decides to kill everyone in it except Noah, Noah’s family and some animals. God certainly doesn’t mince his words: (“And behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven, and everything that is in the earth shall die.” Genesis 6:17) I can’t help but hear an evil “Bwahahahaha” after that.
Chapter Seven
Noah, who is 600 years old just by the by, loads his ark up with his family, then two of every unclean animal and seven of every clean animal. Is a giraffe clean? What about dogs? They tend to eat poo, but they are kind of clean. So anyway, they all pile onto the ark (all 123,000 species of animal, presumably) and God drowns the Earth, and... (“all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.” Genesis 7:22)
God: The first genocidal maniac.
Chapter Eight
Noah and his ark companions wait a long time for the waters to subside. Must’ve been pretty boring in there, but at least there were lots of animals to play with, like tigers, lions, elephants and meerkats.
There are some truly beautiful lines in here though. Check this out: (“The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” Genesis 8:2)
The NLT version of the bible has it translated this way: The underground waters stopped flowing, and the torrential rains from the sky were stopped.
Chapter Nine
They come off the ark and God promises them that they can eat all the beasts in the world, though I wouldn’t like to eat tarantula myself, even if deep fried. Then the weirdest thing happens. Noah gets pissed and falls asleep naked. His son, Ham, accidentally sees Noah naked, runs to tell his brothers, and they cover him up without looking at him. Noah wakes up, discovers that Ham saw him naked, and curses him for eternity. This is the cunt that God saved? A wino who curses his own son for stumbling across him naked?
What is this thing, Christianity? Vacuous dribble about how Jesus loves us? Do these idiots like Guy Sebastian read Genesis? It says, “If your old man gets pissed and takes all his clothes off, and you accidentally see him naked, then you are cursed for eternity.” I’ve received better life-lessons from Fairfax bloggers, and they’re really fucked.
Chapter Ten
Noah’s kids spread around the globe, begetting.
Chapter Eleven
The people are spread, but God doesn’t like how they all speak the same language, so he gives them all different languages so that they can’t, umm, communicate with one another. For some reason. Shame though – in hindsight, I wish he just settled on Italian, and all of us could speak it.
The tower of Babel is worked on. More begetting.
Chapter Twelve
God likes Abram, and promises him some land (belonging to the Canaanites, descendants of naughty Ham, who made the mistake of seeing his father nude). Abram sets off with his wife, his nephew Lot and some other dudes. So anyhoo, they get there, build some temples, but then have to deal with a famine so they go to Egypt for a feed. Abram gets his wife to pretend that she’s actually his sister. He reckons if the Egyptians know that she’s his wife, they’ll kill her.
No, I don’t know why.
So the Pharaoh lets them stay at his joint, and he of course takes a fancy to Abram’s wife (thinking she was his sister), but because he took this fancy, God plagues him. But it wasn’t his fault! He didn’t know that she was Abram’s wife! Abram and God are cunts, and the Pharaoh was right to be pretty pissed off when he found out.
Chapter Thirteen
After completely fucking up the Pharaoh, they leave Egypt and head south. Abram and his nephew Lot are rich, somehow. So rich in fact, the lands were not enough to keep all their cattle, so they agree to split up. Lot goes to Jordan, near the town of Sodom and Abram goes back to the promised land, settling in Hebron.
Chapter Fourteen
War in the vicinity of Jordan. Lot gets looted. Abram finds out and leads an army to at least save Lot, and his extended family and people loyal to them. He brings them all back to his land. So the King of Sodom, who is the most mighty of the warlords, turns up at Abram’s joint and offers him riches in return for handing over Lot and his followers. Abram won’t bargain.
Chapter Fifteen
God promises to help Abram, because he’s a decent fellow. Abram is upset that he doesn’t have a child and heir. God says that Abram will have as many children as there are stars in the sky (about 80,000,000, right?), though his heir will come from his bowels.
No, I don’t get it.
God says Abram can have all the land he can see, all he has to do is kill some heifers, she-goats, rams, turtle-doves and pigeons. Fucking she-goats- who needs them anyway?
The plot twists in this book are all over the place, seriously.
Chapter Sixteen
So it turns out that the reason Abram doesn’t have kids is because his wife, Sarai, has bad plumbing. Easy fixed. Abram fucks the maid (at Sarai’s suggestion). Bible: the first maid-fantasy porn.
At first Sarai is cool with it, but after they fuck the maid gets pregnant and then gets all uppity around Sarai. Abram suggests to her that even though she’s pregnant, she’s still just a maid and that Sarai can do whatever she wants with her. So Sarai kicks her out. God finds the maid wandering about, pregnant, and tells her to get her arse back to the house and be submissive... you know, just shut up and have the fucking baby, woman. God’s misogyny back on display again, not to mention his class society leanings.
I say to the Genesis scientists: If you want Intelligent Design taught in schools because of what is written in Genesis, I demand you also teach that it’s okay for a husband to get the maid pregnant if his wife can’t conceive.
Chapter Seventeen
The maid has a baby – he’s called Ishmael. God changes Abram’s name to Abraham, and says that he will be the father of many great nations. Sarai’s name is changed to Sarah. God promises Abraham that he will have many children (to the maid?) but all the boys have to be circumcised. This is very, very important. Not only should the boys that Abraham fathers be circumcised, so should all the men that live in Abraham’s house, or work there. This sets off a circumcision orgy the likes of which De Sade and Battaille would envy. (“And Abraham took Ishmael his son, and all that were born in his house, and all that were bought with his money, every male among the men of Abraham’s house, and circumcised the flesh of their foreskin in the selfsame day.” Genesis: 17:23)
Even the slaves had to go through with it. I’m circumcised myself, but at least my parents had the decency to have it done when I was too young to remember.
Oh, God also gives Sarah the ability to bear children. Why didn’t he do that in the first place instead of getting Abraham to fuck the maid?
Chapter Eighteen
God and some mates (angels?) visit Abraham. He feeds them. They mention that Sarah will be able to have kids now, which makes Sarah laugh because she reckons she’s too old. God gets a bit antsy and says, (“Is anything too hard for the LORD?” Genesis 18:14). Show-off.
After supper, God mentions he was thinking of destroying Sodom because they are all naughty. Abraham reckons that if there’s some righteous people there, God shouldn’t destroy the city. They haggle about how many righteous people would need to be there in order to save it. God suggest fifty, but Abraham haggles him down to ten. God is a shithouse haggler. Don’t send God into a Thai market-stall to buy souvenirs.
Chapter Nineteen
This is terrific, this chapter. My personal favourite. God’s mates, the two angels, rock up in Sodom and visit Lot. Lot invites the angels in and offers to wash their feet. Fair enough. But then all the locals turn up at Lot’s house because they’ve heard about the angels and they want to have sex with them. Lot comes up with a cunning plan. To save the angels from being raped by the locals, he instead offers his two daughters to be raped. Fortunately, they were never raped because the angels blinded all the locals. But still, the offer was there.
The next morning, the angels tell Lot to get his wife and daughters ready to move out, because they are going to destroy Sodom. They flee towards the town of Zoar and are told not to look back at Sodom, but Lot’s wife couldn’t help but look back and so she was turned into a pillar of salt. This is interpreted in many different ways – the most popular being that she was punished for yearning to stay in Sodom rather than fleeing under the guidance of God. But who could blame her? Sodom was her home, after all, and she was probably getting some pretty good sex from the locals while Lot was at work.
So Lot and his two daughters hid in a cave for a while. The daughters, obviously worried that living in a cave will limit their ability to find decent husbands, decide to get their own Dad, Lot, drunk, and then have sex with him. They do this, and both have children. Feminists reckon that in reality, Lot probably raped them and then blamed them for getting him drunk. Personally, I just think that whoever wrote the story was either a cocaine addict or a pervert. Or both.
Chapter Twenty
Back to Abraham and Sarah, who hit the road to Gerar. They pull the same, “She’s my sister, not my wife” trick on poor Abimelech, King of Gerar. Abimelech fucks Sarah, then gets in trouble with God for fucking someone’s wife. But then... ready for the plot twist? Turns out Sarah IS in fact Abraham’s half-sister (as well as his wife). Wow. It’s like ‘Chinatown’, or the private letters of Lord Byron. Anyway, Abimelech gives heaps of money to Abraham and all is forgiven.
The moral of this chapter is, umm, I have no fucking idea.
Chapter Twenty-One
Sarah, who was once infertile, has a child called Isaac. But remember, Abraham already has a son (Ishmael) to the maid. But now that his wife Sarah has a child, suddenly Ishmael is not so important. After consulting with God, they kick the maid and Ishmael out of the house.
What a mind-fuck.
Just as the maid and the kid are about to die of starvation, God takes pity (for once) and promises that the kid will grow to be a great leader.
Abimelech the King of them parts makes a truce with Abraham, the most wealthy and influential person in them parts. Kind of like Hawke and Murdoch agreeing to be friends, for mutual benefit. Abraham bribes Abimelech with ewes, and in return, Abimelech builds Abraham a well. You scratch my back... The first recorded moment of local council bribery.
Chapter Twenty-Two
God is being a cunt again. He tells Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. Abraham doesn’t have a problem with this, and just before he kills his son, God tells him it was all a joke / test.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Sarah dies. Abraham buys some land near Hebron to use as a burial ground for Sarah and anyone else related that dies.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Abraham, now getting old and ill, makes his servant promise that he won’t let Isaac ever marry a dirty Canaanite (the descendants of Ham, who saw Noah naked that time). In other words, keep the blood pure. Though, in hindsight, because they are all relatable back to Noah, the plan will fail anyway.
So the servant heads off to find a suitable wife for Isaac with some camels. Conspiring with God, he decides that whoever offers water to him and the camels must be a good woman and a worthy wife for Isaac. This woman is Rebekah (a second cousin to Isaac anyway) and aside from offering water, happens to be a sexy virgin. The servant then purchases Rebekah with lots of jewels. The servant and Rebekah’s family have a piss-up, then the next morning the servant and Rebekah head back to Gerar. She meets Isaac, and they get married immediately.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Abraham marries a chick called Keturah. They have lots of babies, plus he also has lots of babies with concubines, but Isaac is his favourite. He bequeaths everything he owns to Isaac, but only gives his other children ‘gifts’. Abraham lives to 175 before ‘giving up the ghost’ (interesting – I never knew that was a Biblical colloquialism). He is buried in Ephron, near his wife.
Isaac and Rebekah have twins. God, being a cunt, makes the pregnancy painful, and tells Rebekah that the firstborn will always be a servant of the second-born, even though they will both be leaders of nations. (“And the first came out red, all over like a hairy garment...” Genesis 25:25)
Esau was the firstborn and grows to be a good hunter. Jacob is the second-born twin, and he grows to be a dumb cunt who ‘dwells in tents’. Isaac prefers Esau because he ‘eats his venison’, but Rebekah prefers the lazy one... probably a mummy’s boy. What is it with these Biblical families preferring one kid over another?
Anyway, because Esau was born first, he was set to inherit the family fortune, but one day he falls ill and desperately needs some food and water, so he goes to his twin brother and pleads for some food and water, but Jacob refuses unless Esau ‘sells’ his birthright. Esau, desperate for some food and water, agrees. Jacob, who until this time had done nothing but ‘dwelt in tents’ like some ancient-era stoner, becomes the heir to the family fortune by being a total cunt.
Half-time summary
There is no mention of an afterlife. I find that interesting.
There is nothing in Genesis that is ‘moral’ by current standards. The lesson is: God created everything so you have to play by his rules, whether they make sense or not. That’s the only rule. If this involves pimping / selling your daughters, fucking your own daughters, killing people, bribing officials, being cursed for eternity for doing what comes natural, then, so be it. That’s the rules.
It is written beautifully. Not as well as Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky, but beautiful nonetheless. If you take your time and read it out loud, it is wonderfully poetic and powerful.
Anyone who claims Genesis contains scientific facts is a retard.
By author unknown.
(King James Version, Penguin Publication of 2006)
I’ve decided to read The Holy Bible so you don’t have to. I will review every chapter, start to finish, both old and new testaments. It may take years, and I’m only going to read each ‘book’ every second book I read.
In the case of Genesis, the first book, I had to stop after 25 chapters because it was doing my head in. So, this entry is only for the first 25 chapters. I’m going to read and review a normal novel next, then I’ll do the next 25 chapters of Genesis.
Chapter One
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Genesis 1:1-3
That’s the thing about the King James version: it’s written exquisitely. I have no idea why anybody would bother reading any other ‘modern’ version because bloody hell, they’re just shit. They leave out all the poetry and what remains is the rubble of poetry, cheapening the ‘message’, rendering it an un-inspiring cult.
In Chapter One, God creates everything in six days and then takes a day off, thus giving launch to the labour movement.
The fact He made the world in less than a week is considered by several million mentally ill people to be scientific fact. They even have a name for it: Genesis Science, which is taught as Intelligent Design. These people are morons, and have no appreciation of poetry, or, for that matter, the beauty of the universe.
Chapter Two
Garden of Eden, Adam made in God’s likeness, Adam names every animal (must’ve taken a while, and I’m sure he was getting desperate in the end: “What’s this one do?”, “It eats ants,” “I call it ant-eater”) Eve made from his rib while he was asleep... you know the story. The two of ‘em hang about, shamelessly naked, like most normal husbands and wives.
If the Genesis scientists believe God made everything in six days, they must also believe that Adam named the platypus, even if it ended up only being found on the other side of the world.
Chapter Three
Oops. Trouble in Eden. See, the serpent suggests eating from the forbidden tree, and Eve at first says no because God had forbidden it, and so the serpent says, “Ye shall not surely die. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Genesis 3: 4-5
At this stage, I was yelling out, “Eat it! Otherwise you’re just a sheep, hanging about in a garden, eating all day, achieving nothing.” And thankfully, she ate it, and that’s why I can write book reviews on the internet.
She then gives Adam some Forbidden Fruit, and interestingly, in the King James version, he willingly eats it (I’ve read other newer versions where it is suggested that she kind of convinced him to eat it, but in this translation, taken directly from Ancient Greek, Adam says, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat” Genesis 3: 12).
God gets pissed off, and takes voice and legs away from the serpent. He then creates ‘emnity’ between man and woman, and tells the woman that all women will now have ‘sorrow’ when having children (read: pain) and says that husbands will ‘rule over’ wives. God: The first misogynist. And for every Christian who argues this with me I say: Read the fucking text. It’s what it says. You can’t go on about creation and homosexuality if you can’t also acknowledge these bits.
But here’s the bit I found most interesting in all of Genesis. God says, “...for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”. Genesis 3: 19. In other words, when you die, you return to the ground. No mention of heaven, other than as a place God resides. No mention of being good and getting to heaven. God is clear: You come from dust, you will end up as dust.
If the Genesis Scientists believe that God created everything in six days, they must also believe snakes once talked and had legs.
Adam and Eve are evicted from the Garden of Eden, like streakers at a Test Match.
Chapter Four
Adam and Eve have two kids – Cain and Abel. Cain is a tiller, Abel a shepherd. They decide to make an offering to God. Cain offers some fruit. Abel offers meat. God prefers meat (so why are Adventists vegetarians?), and tells them so. God is clearly a cunt. Sometimes I get presents from two members of my family, but I don’t say, “Oh, I prefer this one to that one”. I thank them both, humbly. But I’m not God.
Cain sooks because God doesn’t like his gift. Then he kills Abel. Man, what a dysfunctional family. God’s first effort at Sims 6000BC sucks.
God is annoyed, so he tells Cain to go walkabout, you know, forever. Cain says, “But I’ll get killed!” (by who though? There’s only your mum and dad left, and surely you can outrun them). God puts a mark on him, so that he can recognise him (?) and to make sure nobody kills him, and if anyone does, they’ll cop revenge. This makes no sense, but fuck, neither do some of the plot twists in Romeo & Juliet, and that’s still a great yarn.
Cain goes to a place called ‘The land of Nod’ and marries someone, which, by logic, must be his sister. Cain, the first incest perpetrator. They have kids who have kids, and even Adam and Eve have another son called Seth. Lots of begetting.
If the Genesis Scientists believe that God created everything in six days, they must also believe the first family were victims/perpetrators of incest.
Chapter Five
Lots of begetting.
Chapter Six
God hates his Sims 6000BC game so much he decides to kill everyone in it except Noah, Noah’s family and some animals. God certainly doesn’t mince his words: (“And behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven, and everything that is in the earth shall die.” Genesis 6:17) I can’t help but hear an evil “Bwahahahaha” after that.
Chapter Seven
Noah, who is 600 years old just by the by, loads his ark up with his family, then two of every unclean animal and seven of every clean animal. Is a giraffe clean? What about dogs? They tend to eat poo, but they are kind of clean. So anyway, they all pile onto the ark (all 123,000 species of animal, presumably) and God drowns the Earth, and... (“all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.” Genesis 7:22)
God: The first genocidal maniac.
Chapter Eight
Noah and his ark companions wait a long time for the waters to subside. Must’ve been pretty boring in there, but at least there were lots of animals to play with, like tigers, lions, elephants and meerkats.
There are some truly beautiful lines in here though. Check this out: (“The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” Genesis 8:2)
The NLT version of the bible has it translated this way: The underground waters stopped flowing, and the torrential rains from the sky were stopped.
Chapter Nine
They come off the ark and God promises them that they can eat all the beasts in the world, though I wouldn’t like to eat tarantula myself, even if deep fried. Then the weirdest thing happens. Noah gets pissed and falls asleep naked. His son, Ham, accidentally sees Noah naked, runs to tell his brothers, and they cover him up without looking at him. Noah wakes up, discovers that Ham saw him naked, and curses him for eternity. This is the cunt that God saved? A wino who curses his own son for stumbling across him naked?
What is this thing, Christianity? Vacuous dribble about how Jesus loves us? Do these idiots like Guy Sebastian read Genesis? It says, “If your old man gets pissed and takes all his clothes off, and you accidentally see him naked, then you are cursed for eternity.” I’ve received better life-lessons from Fairfax bloggers, and they’re really fucked.
Chapter Ten
Noah’s kids spread around the globe, begetting.
Chapter Eleven
The people are spread, but God doesn’t like how they all speak the same language, so he gives them all different languages so that they can’t, umm, communicate with one another. For some reason. Shame though – in hindsight, I wish he just settled on Italian, and all of us could speak it.
The tower of Babel is worked on. More begetting.
Chapter Twelve
God likes Abram, and promises him some land (belonging to the Canaanites, descendants of naughty Ham, who made the mistake of seeing his father nude). Abram sets off with his wife, his nephew Lot and some other dudes. So anyhoo, they get there, build some temples, but then have to deal with a famine so they go to Egypt for a feed. Abram gets his wife to pretend that she’s actually his sister. He reckons if the Egyptians know that she’s his wife, they’ll kill her.
No, I don’t know why.
So the Pharaoh lets them stay at his joint, and he of course takes a fancy to Abram’s wife (thinking she was his sister), but because he took this fancy, God plagues him. But it wasn’t his fault! He didn’t know that she was Abram’s wife! Abram and God are cunts, and the Pharaoh was right to be pretty pissed off when he found out.
Chapter Thirteen
After completely fucking up the Pharaoh, they leave Egypt and head south. Abram and his nephew Lot are rich, somehow. So rich in fact, the lands were not enough to keep all their cattle, so they agree to split up. Lot goes to Jordan, near the town of Sodom and Abram goes back to the promised land, settling in Hebron.
Chapter Fourteen
War in the vicinity of Jordan. Lot gets looted. Abram finds out and leads an army to at least save Lot, and his extended family and people loyal to them. He brings them all back to his land. So the King of Sodom, who is the most mighty of the warlords, turns up at Abram’s joint and offers him riches in return for handing over Lot and his followers. Abram won’t bargain.
Chapter Fifteen
God promises to help Abram, because he’s a decent fellow. Abram is upset that he doesn’t have a child and heir. God says that Abram will have as many children as there are stars in the sky (about 80,000,000, right?), though his heir will come from his bowels.
No, I don’t get it.
God says Abram can have all the land he can see, all he has to do is kill some heifers, she-goats, rams, turtle-doves and pigeons. Fucking she-goats- who needs them anyway?
The plot twists in this book are all over the place, seriously.
Chapter Sixteen
So it turns out that the reason Abram doesn’t have kids is because his wife, Sarai, has bad plumbing. Easy fixed. Abram fucks the maid (at Sarai’s suggestion). Bible: the first maid-fantasy porn.
At first Sarai is cool with it, but after they fuck the maid gets pregnant and then gets all uppity around Sarai. Abram suggests to her that even though she’s pregnant, she’s still just a maid and that Sarai can do whatever she wants with her. So Sarai kicks her out. God finds the maid wandering about, pregnant, and tells her to get her arse back to the house and be submissive... you know, just shut up and have the fucking baby, woman. God’s misogyny back on display again, not to mention his class society leanings.
I say to the Genesis scientists: If you want Intelligent Design taught in schools because of what is written in Genesis, I demand you also teach that it’s okay for a husband to get the maid pregnant if his wife can’t conceive.
Chapter Seventeen
The maid has a baby – he’s called Ishmael. God changes Abram’s name to Abraham, and says that he will be the father of many great nations. Sarai’s name is changed to Sarah. God promises Abraham that he will have many children (to the maid?) but all the boys have to be circumcised. This is very, very important. Not only should the boys that Abraham fathers be circumcised, so should all the men that live in Abraham’s house, or work there. This sets off a circumcision orgy the likes of which De Sade and Battaille would envy. (“And Abraham took Ishmael his son, and all that were born in his house, and all that were bought with his money, every male among the men of Abraham’s house, and circumcised the flesh of their foreskin in the selfsame day.” Genesis: 17:23)
Even the slaves had to go through with it. I’m circumcised myself, but at least my parents had the decency to have it done when I was too young to remember.
Oh, God also gives Sarah the ability to bear children. Why didn’t he do that in the first place instead of getting Abraham to fuck the maid?
Chapter Eighteen
God and some mates (angels?) visit Abraham. He feeds them. They mention that Sarah will be able to have kids now, which makes Sarah laugh because she reckons she’s too old. God gets a bit antsy and says, (“Is anything too hard for the LORD?” Genesis 18:14). Show-off.
After supper, God mentions he was thinking of destroying Sodom because they are all naughty. Abraham reckons that if there’s some righteous people there, God shouldn’t destroy the city. They haggle about how many righteous people would need to be there in order to save it. God suggest fifty, but Abraham haggles him down to ten. God is a shithouse haggler. Don’t send God into a Thai market-stall to buy souvenirs.
Chapter Nineteen
This is terrific, this chapter. My personal favourite. God’s mates, the two angels, rock up in Sodom and visit Lot. Lot invites the angels in and offers to wash their feet. Fair enough. But then all the locals turn up at Lot’s house because they’ve heard about the angels and they want to have sex with them. Lot comes up with a cunning plan. To save the angels from being raped by the locals, he instead offers his two daughters to be raped. Fortunately, they were never raped because the angels blinded all the locals. But still, the offer was there.
The next morning, the angels tell Lot to get his wife and daughters ready to move out, because they are going to destroy Sodom. They flee towards the town of Zoar and are told not to look back at Sodom, but Lot’s wife couldn’t help but look back and so she was turned into a pillar of salt. This is interpreted in many different ways – the most popular being that she was punished for yearning to stay in Sodom rather than fleeing under the guidance of God. But who could blame her? Sodom was her home, after all, and she was probably getting some pretty good sex from the locals while Lot was at work.
So Lot and his two daughters hid in a cave for a while. The daughters, obviously worried that living in a cave will limit their ability to find decent husbands, decide to get their own Dad, Lot, drunk, and then have sex with him. They do this, and both have children. Feminists reckon that in reality, Lot probably raped them and then blamed them for getting him drunk. Personally, I just think that whoever wrote the story was either a cocaine addict or a pervert. Or both.
Chapter Twenty
Back to Abraham and Sarah, who hit the road to Gerar. They pull the same, “She’s my sister, not my wife” trick on poor Abimelech, King of Gerar. Abimelech fucks Sarah, then gets in trouble with God for fucking someone’s wife. But then... ready for the plot twist? Turns out Sarah IS in fact Abraham’s half-sister (as well as his wife). Wow. It’s like ‘Chinatown’, or the private letters of Lord Byron. Anyway, Abimelech gives heaps of money to Abraham and all is forgiven.
The moral of this chapter is, umm, I have no fucking idea.
Chapter Twenty-One
Sarah, who was once infertile, has a child called Isaac. But remember, Abraham already has a son (Ishmael) to the maid. But now that his wife Sarah has a child, suddenly Ishmael is not so important. After consulting with God, they kick the maid and Ishmael out of the house.
What a mind-fuck.
Just as the maid and the kid are about to die of starvation, God takes pity (for once) and promises that the kid will grow to be a great leader.
Abimelech the King of them parts makes a truce with Abraham, the most wealthy and influential person in them parts. Kind of like Hawke and Murdoch agreeing to be friends, for mutual benefit. Abraham bribes Abimelech with ewes, and in return, Abimelech builds Abraham a well. You scratch my back... The first recorded moment of local council bribery.
Chapter Twenty-Two
God is being a cunt again. He tells Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. Abraham doesn’t have a problem with this, and just before he kills his son, God tells him it was all a joke / test.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Sarah dies. Abraham buys some land near Hebron to use as a burial ground for Sarah and anyone else related that dies.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Abraham, now getting old and ill, makes his servant promise that he won’t let Isaac ever marry a dirty Canaanite (the descendants of Ham, who saw Noah naked that time). In other words, keep the blood pure. Though, in hindsight, because they are all relatable back to Noah, the plan will fail anyway.
So the servant heads off to find a suitable wife for Isaac with some camels. Conspiring with God, he decides that whoever offers water to him and the camels must be a good woman and a worthy wife for Isaac. This woman is Rebekah (a second cousin to Isaac anyway) and aside from offering water, happens to be a sexy virgin. The servant then purchases Rebekah with lots of jewels. The servant and Rebekah’s family have a piss-up, then the next morning the servant and Rebekah head back to Gerar. She meets Isaac, and they get married immediately.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Abraham marries a chick called Keturah. They have lots of babies, plus he also has lots of babies with concubines, but Isaac is his favourite. He bequeaths everything he owns to Isaac, but only gives his other children ‘gifts’. Abraham lives to 175 before ‘giving up the ghost’ (interesting – I never knew that was a Biblical colloquialism). He is buried in Ephron, near his wife.
Isaac and Rebekah have twins. God, being a cunt, makes the pregnancy painful, and tells Rebekah that the firstborn will always be a servant of the second-born, even though they will both be leaders of nations. (“And the first came out red, all over like a hairy garment...” Genesis 25:25)
Esau was the firstborn and grows to be a good hunter. Jacob is the second-born twin, and he grows to be a dumb cunt who ‘dwells in tents’. Isaac prefers Esau because he ‘eats his venison’, but Rebekah prefers the lazy one... probably a mummy’s boy. What is it with these Biblical families preferring one kid over another?
Anyway, because Esau was born first, he was set to inherit the family fortune, but one day he falls ill and desperately needs some food and water, so he goes to his twin brother and pleads for some food and water, but Jacob refuses unless Esau ‘sells’ his birthright. Esau, desperate for some food and water, agrees. Jacob, who until this time had done nothing but ‘dwelt in tents’ like some ancient-era stoner, becomes the heir to the family fortune by being a total cunt.
Half-time summary
There is no mention of an afterlife. I find that interesting.
There is nothing in Genesis that is ‘moral’ by current standards. The lesson is: God created everything so you have to play by his rules, whether they make sense or not. That’s the only rule. If this involves pimping / selling your daughters, fucking your own daughters, killing people, bribing officials, being cursed for eternity for doing what comes natural, then, so be it. That’s the rules.
It is written beautifully. Not as well as Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky, but beautiful nonetheless. If you take your time and read it out loud, it is wonderfully poetic and powerful.
Anyone who claims Genesis contains scientific facts is a retard.
Tuesday, 21 August 2007
Dead Europe
Dead Europe by Christos Tsoilkas
2005
Synopsis:
Well, there’s two synopses (synopsi?). The book is kind of two books, although they come together like a yin-yang at the end.
One book is the story of Isaac, a struggling Australian photographer who is in Europe on some sort of arts grant thingo (I hate the term ‘arts grant’... I start thinking of ‘installations’ that make no sense, you know, some artist gets $100,000 to stick a red broom up their arse). Isaac starts in Athens, Greece, then visits the Greek village his family came from, then travels to other cities in Europe, ending up nearly dead in a hospital bed in London. Throughout his journey he longs for his de-facto partner Colin in Melbourne, but obviously not longingly enough to not cheat on poor Colin. Our very gay friend Isaac manages to have heaps and heaps of rugged, blood-and-gore sex on his journey.
Oh, there was one tender sex scene in London, but that was over in a flash. Oh, and once, having a bizarre attack of heterosexuality, he cunnilingus’d a Brazilian woman in a train because he could -- “... smell the velvet in her cunt” --- Page 256 – The ‘velvet’ to which he refers is her menstrual blood, which he wanted to drink. As she orgasms, he comes in his pants and then develops a kind of bloodlust for the rest of his journey. He may or may not have stayed with a ghost in France.
The other half of the book is the story of his maternal ancestry, starting with his great-grandparents in a remote village in Greece who end up as ‘refos’ in Melbourne.
The Cons:
This book is very gay, and by ‘gay’ I mean homosexual. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, other than the fact I am not homosexual, so every time there was a gay sex scene and loving descriptions of cocks and arses I kind of flinched. I imagine gay dudes suffer the same case of, “Whatever, let’s just get on with the story” every time they have to read erotic, sensual or even implied descriptions of heterosexual sex, which is probably 95% of all such material (guessing – I only have anecdotal evidence of this based on all TV shows and movies). Isaac likes it rough too. The more pain, the more messy the fluid spread, the more debauched, the more vulnerable his sex partner, the more fucked-up they are... the more he likes it.
Having heaps of gay sex is not BAD, as such. It doesn’t make it a bad book. It just means that someone like me, who has zero interest in and receives zero titillation from rough gay sex, gets occasionally sidetracked. And there’s a lot of it. Unlike watching a film with a gay sex scene, I can’t just go and put the kettle on. With a book, I come back with a cup of Liptons and the words, --- “Only his cock was exposed. He lay the boy on the podium, turned him onto his back, lifted the boy’s thin smooth legs over his own tuxedoed shoulders, and he entered him... a shower of semen arced, reflecting silver as it was touched by the candlelight”--- Page 225-226 are still there. I raise my cup of tea to my lips and think, "Hmm, must root a chick in the next month or so."
Every second chapter is the story of Isaac’s journey through Europe, and so every second chapter there’s guaranteed to be either rough gay sex (usually on drugs), vomit, piss, shit, pain, tears, sweat, violence and blood. Always blood.
Some of it was fascinating, most of it was gross. In the author's defence, it was meant to be.
The Pros:
Everything else. There are three aspects to the novel that I fucking loved, and had me gripped.
From start to finish, the discussion of Jews is paramount in both the story of Isaac’s journey and the story of his family.
There is a very direct Jewish plotline at one point, set back during WWII when Isaac’s grandparents, young newlyweds at the time, hide a teenage Jewish lad from the Nazis. They do this at the behest of the boy's father, who gives the young newlyweds all his treasures and money and is never seen again. Now, at the same time, the young newlyweds are having trouble conceiving a child, so Lucia, the beautiful young wife, fucks the poor Jewish teenager, gets pregnant, doesn’t tell her husband it's not his child, and instead, asks her husband to kill the Jew... ---“It is by protecting that bastard Hebrew that you are condemning your soul”--- Page 118.
It is one of the more powerful chapters/sequences of a novel I have read in quite some time. Indirectly, throughout the book, the discussion of ‘The Jews’ and anti-Semitism is discussed in great length and referenced in a multitude of ways.: The general anti-Semitism of your average European (something I noticed when I spent a couple of years there), the fact that Isaac’s boyfriend had a swastika tattoo and had once defaced a Jewish cemetery, the fact that a few Jewish characters appear and disappear, coy, gloating or otherwise of their Jewishness. It is indeed an astute observation Christos is making, one that is largely ignored, but I have been acutely aware of myself for many years: That anti-semitism DEFINES some people – hell, it defines some nations, and it envelopes people, and obsesses them, and they mythologise the Jews, even when they are trying to be impartial, and the whole Jewish thing is MASSIVE when studying the history of Europe and the current state of affairs in the world. It just ain’t discussed in that context. It’s swept under carpets. It’s denied, even. It deserves a whole book (and I’m sure many have been written) but Christos hammers it home from start to finish, from every different angle, from different voices, in different tongues, and he does it beautifully, powerfully and artistically.
The next pro is his description of the dying Europe, the Europe in decay, as seen through the eyes of an Aussie Greek. I’m a bit of a philhellene myself, and I lived in Athens for 18 months so I’m always eager to read anything about a Greek by a Greek. The fact he’s an Aussie Greek makes it even more familiar to me. His descriptions of Athens and the Greek villages were spot-on, and it was convincing enough for me to open my mind to anything he said about the rest of his journey through Europe. There’s a lot of referencing to Europe simply being ‘different’ to Australia. And it is. There’s something about Australia’s open-spaces and lack of architectural history that makes Europe an alien place. Not better or worse, just alien, and the ‘decay’ of Europe does do something to Australian minds. It decays us. We see a crumbling building, we crumble morally. I can’t explain it, but I got there and all I did was crumble (having a lot of fun in the process). In all of Isaac’s travels he meets exhausted, debauched, confused and angry people...and they seem normal, as if that’s all that Europe can offer. Isaac ends up decaying so far he winds up nearly dead in a London hospital – this is explained as being somewhat the result of a curse on his family, somewhat Isaac’s own bloodlust / delirium, Europe’s decay and perhaps just a good old virus. Or all four. It’s not clear, but hell, I didn’t want a medical explanation. Whatever the case, this is not a travel book – there’s no Eiffel Towers, Parthenons, wacky folk dancers or tours of the Vatican with a thermos and a sesame biscuit. It’s a Europe of prostitution, drugs, crumbling buildings, ancient blood fueds, racism, porn, bashings, beatings, poverty, casinos and pure beauty all rolled up into one experience – decay.
It reminded me of this painting:
The final pro is the whole back-story of his maternal ancestry. It starts like a fairy-tale: ---“High in the mountains , where the wind goes home to rest, lived Lucia, the most beautiful woman in all of Europe” --- Page 15. And it just gets better from there. It’s a tale of bickering superstitious Greeks, and who doesn’t like a tale of bickering superstitious Greeks? Kazantsikas is one of my favourite authors ever (Zorba The Greek and Christ Recrucified – my two favourites), and Tsoilkas’s tale is like one of his. It’s fucking fantastic, horribly violent at times, but fucking fantastic. There’s devils roaming, beautiful women, wars, infanticide... it’s got it all, and it’s a ripping yarn and I wish it was a book of itself, even though Tsoilkas quite nicely converges the two stories at the end.
All in all, a pretty good read, and the fact the author has to work part-time as a vet nurse is an indictment on the Australian literary community.
I give it a B-minus.
2005
Synopsis:
Well, there’s two synopses (synopsi?). The book is kind of two books, although they come together like a yin-yang at the end.
One book is the story of Isaac, a struggling Australian photographer who is in Europe on some sort of arts grant thingo (I hate the term ‘arts grant’... I start thinking of ‘installations’ that make no sense, you know, some artist gets $100,000 to stick a red broom up their arse). Isaac starts in Athens, Greece, then visits the Greek village his family came from, then travels to other cities in Europe, ending up nearly dead in a hospital bed in London. Throughout his journey he longs for his de-facto partner Colin in Melbourne, but obviously not longingly enough to not cheat on poor Colin. Our very gay friend Isaac manages to have heaps and heaps of rugged, blood-and-gore sex on his journey.
Oh, there was one tender sex scene in London, but that was over in a flash. Oh, and once, having a bizarre attack of heterosexuality, he cunnilingus’d a Brazilian woman in a train because he could -- “... smell the velvet in her cunt” --- Page 256 – The ‘velvet’ to which he refers is her menstrual blood, which he wanted to drink. As she orgasms, he comes in his pants and then develops a kind of bloodlust for the rest of his journey. He may or may not have stayed with a ghost in France.
The other half of the book is the story of his maternal ancestry, starting with his great-grandparents in a remote village in Greece who end up as ‘refos’ in Melbourne.
The Cons:
This book is very gay, and by ‘gay’ I mean homosexual. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, other than the fact I am not homosexual, so every time there was a gay sex scene and loving descriptions of cocks and arses I kind of flinched. I imagine gay dudes suffer the same case of, “Whatever, let’s just get on with the story” every time they have to read erotic, sensual or even implied descriptions of heterosexual sex, which is probably 95% of all such material (guessing – I only have anecdotal evidence of this based on all TV shows and movies). Isaac likes it rough too. The more pain, the more messy the fluid spread, the more debauched, the more vulnerable his sex partner, the more fucked-up they are... the more he likes it.
Having heaps of gay sex is not BAD, as such. It doesn’t make it a bad book. It just means that someone like me, who has zero interest in and receives zero titillation from rough gay sex, gets occasionally sidetracked. And there’s a lot of it. Unlike watching a film with a gay sex scene, I can’t just go and put the kettle on. With a book, I come back with a cup of Liptons and the words, --- “Only his cock was exposed. He lay the boy on the podium, turned him onto his back, lifted the boy’s thin smooth legs over his own tuxedoed shoulders, and he entered him... a shower of semen arced, reflecting silver as it was touched by the candlelight”--- Page 225-226 are still there. I raise my cup of tea to my lips and think, "Hmm, must root a chick in the next month or so."
Every second chapter is the story of Isaac’s journey through Europe, and so every second chapter there’s guaranteed to be either rough gay sex (usually on drugs), vomit, piss, shit, pain, tears, sweat, violence and blood. Always blood.
Some of it was fascinating, most of it was gross. In the author's defence, it was meant to be.
The Pros:
Everything else. There are three aspects to the novel that I fucking loved, and had me gripped.
From start to finish, the discussion of Jews is paramount in both the story of Isaac’s journey and the story of his family.
There is a very direct Jewish plotline at one point, set back during WWII when Isaac’s grandparents, young newlyweds at the time, hide a teenage Jewish lad from the Nazis. They do this at the behest of the boy's father, who gives the young newlyweds all his treasures and money and is never seen again. Now, at the same time, the young newlyweds are having trouble conceiving a child, so Lucia, the beautiful young wife, fucks the poor Jewish teenager, gets pregnant, doesn’t tell her husband it's not his child, and instead, asks her husband to kill the Jew... ---“It is by protecting that bastard Hebrew that you are condemning your soul”--- Page 118.
It is one of the more powerful chapters/sequences of a novel I have read in quite some time. Indirectly, throughout the book, the discussion of ‘The Jews’ and anti-Semitism is discussed in great length and referenced in a multitude of ways.: The general anti-Semitism of your average European (something I noticed when I spent a couple of years there), the fact that Isaac’s boyfriend had a swastika tattoo and had once defaced a Jewish cemetery, the fact that a few Jewish characters appear and disappear, coy, gloating or otherwise of their Jewishness. It is indeed an astute observation Christos is making, one that is largely ignored, but I have been acutely aware of myself for many years: That anti-semitism DEFINES some people – hell, it defines some nations, and it envelopes people, and obsesses them, and they mythologise the Jews, even when they are trying to be impartial, and the whole Jewish thing is MASSIVE when studying the history of Europe and the current state of affairs in the world. It just ain’t discussed in that context. It’s swept under carpets. It’s denied, even. It deserves a whole book (and I’m sure many have been written) but Christos hammers it home from start to finish, from every different angle, from different voices, in different tongues, and he does it beautifully, powerfully and artistically.
The next pro is his description of the dying Europe, the Europe in decay, as seen through the eyes of an Aussie Greek. I’m a bit of a philhellene myself, and I lived in Athens for 18 months so I’m always eager to read anything about a Greek by a Greek. The fact he’s an Aussie Greek makes it even more familiar to me. His descriptions of Athens and the Greek villages were spot-on, and it was convincing enough for me to open my mind to anything he said about the rest of his journey through Europe. There’s a lot of referencing to Europe simply being ‘different’ to Australia. And it is. There’s something about Australia’s open-spaces and lack of architectural history that makes Europe an alien place. Not better or worse, just alien, and the ‘decay’ of Europe does do something to Australian minds. It decays us. We see a crumbling building, we crumble morally. I can’t explain it, but I got there and all I did was crumble (having a lot of fun in the process). In all of Isaac’s travels he meets exhausted, debauched, confused and angry people...and they seem normal, as if that’s all that Europe can offer. Isaac ends up decaying so far he winds up nearly dead in a London hospital – this is explained as being somewhat the result of a curse on his family, somewhat Isaac’s own bloodlust / delirium, Europe’s decay and perhaps just a good old virus. Or all four. It’s not clear, but hell, I didn’t want a medical explanation. Whatever the case, this is not a travel book – there’s no Eiffel Towers, Parthenons, wacky folk dancers or tours of the Vatican with a thermos and a sesame biscuit. It’s a Europe of prostitution, drugs, crumbling buildings, ancient blood fueds, racism, porn, bashings, beatings, poverty, casinos and pure beauty all rolled up into one experience – decay.
It reminded me of this painting:
The final pro is the whole back-story of his maternal ancestry. It starts like a fairy-tale: ---“High in the mountains , where the wind goes home to rest, lived Lucia, the most beautiful woman in all of Europe” --- Page 15. And it just gets better from there. It’s a tale of bickering superstitious Greeks, and who doesn’t like a tale of bickering superstitious Greeks? Kazantsikas is one of my favourite authors ever (Zorba The Greek and Christ Recrucified – my two favourites), and Tsoilkas’s tale is like one of his. It’s fucking fantastic, horribly violent at times, but fucking fantastic. There’s devils roaming, beautiful women, wars, infanticide... it’s got it all, and it’s a ripping yarn and I wish it was a book of itself, even though Tsoilkas quite nicely converges the two stories at the end.
All in all, a pretty good read, and the fact the author has to work part-time as a vet nurse is an indictment on the Australian literary community.
I give it a B-minus.
Friday, 22 June 2007
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