A Spot Of Bother

By Mark Haddon



This is the same bloke who wrote 'The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time' which I read four or five years ago and although I don't remember much about it, I do remember enjoying it. I wish I could say the same for this book, especially because the book was given to me by Pony Girl.

Self-loathing and self-obsessed middle class tossers getting agitated about stuff. That's kind of it.

I wouldn't have one character from this book over for tea.

It's all based around the extended Hall family and the build-up to the daughter's (second) wedding. There's the daughter herself who's a rotten bitch, her son from a previous marriage who talks way too well for a kid in a nappy, her husband-to-be who has nothing going for him except money, the gay son who's a prat, the infedelious bitch-mother and her hairy lover, and poor old Dad, George, who is going insane. He's the main character and perhaps the only one I had any pity for, because at least insanity is a reason and/or excuse for self-mutilation. The rest have no excuse, and if I was meant to feel empathy towards any of them (which I think I was supposed to) then either I failed the author, or the author failed me.

To be clear on this, 'bitch-mother' and 'gay prat' are just my summations. I think Haddon genuinely expected us (the readers) to like these people. But in my mind, they were a bunch of cunts and I was hoping that the last chapter had a line like, "And anyway, a plane crashed into the wedding and they all died except George."

This orgy of neuroses and self-loathing is not for me. It's for people who get it. It's for the people who are like that... who can't make up their mind, commitment-phobes, and yet at the same time they are ubermensches, narcissicsts, and also happen to be paranoid... who in any situation will first establish an esacpe route just in case, the people who play their cards close to their chest and will not or cannot express themselves for (unfounded) fear of retaliation - the people who say nothing at the exact time they should be communicating. They are the people that will love this book, because the Hall family is their template.

At least Token Gay had a small epiphany "... it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss about what other people thought." Though we had to wait until page 406 for this twat to turn, and what totally shat me is that his ex-boyfriend, who should have known better, rewarded Pratboy by magically coming back into his life.

In my experience, epiphanies aren't about righting old mistakes, they're about ensuring they don't happen again.

**

Haddon's writing style annoyed me too.

"Of course there were times when she worried. That Katie would never get a decent job. Or fall pregnant by accident."

What's with the fullstops?

He also does a Peter Carey.

"Aiden bawled Katie out... she resigned. And Patsy cried because people were shouting."

'Aiden' and 'Patsy' were never mentioned before that paragraph, and never mentioned again. I call it a 'Peter Carey' because he starts chapters with lines like "The blue jar was on the top shelf." What blue jar? Would it kill you to write, "A blue jar..."? Oh that's right, it's called writing.

But in this book's defence, it was a page-turner. The chapters were mostly very short - two or three pages would be an average, so the scenes were all like vignettes and because they jumped character to character I found myself having to keep reading so as I could get to what happened next. But it was page-turning in the same way Home & Away possibly is (I've never seen it). You watch four episodes in a row, and you have to find out what happens next.

The book was... engaging. I'll give it that.

I didn't hate the book as much as I hated the characters in it.

D.

*

Pony Girl is gone now. Not out of the country yet, but gone nonetheless. I'm a little shattered, and fragile. By jesus I loved that girl.

My family happen to be cracking up somewhat as well (maybe that's why the book resonated so negatively... we're all helping each other, and yet the family in the book were all too self-obsessed to particularly care about one another), I'm work-busy, and I'm lovesick as all Hell.

I'm about 6 books behind on this blog, so be prepared for a few entries. I find it good therapy to rant to strangers, thinly disguising my tantrums as art criticism.

The God Delusion

By Richard Dawkins



Over the Christmas period I met a girl called Andromeda 3.4. We hit it off instantly and passionately. After only a short time she put the hard word on me and suggested we commit to being in a relationship, and, with much glee, I accepted. I had my first real girlfriend in more than two years; a particularly attractive and loving one at that.

My heart was fluttering and the sun was out. I felt like Superman.

Seriously, I was into her. No complaints other than superficial ones, like, for instance, she didn’t have a car... but that’s easy fixed. Get a car. I even contemplated buying her one. Problem solved. It’s not like there was anything that made me feel any concern that our fledgling relationship would come under any strain. She partied a bit hard for my liking too, but that didn’t really bother me. I don’t have to partake every time, and she did point out that when in a relationship she was more content to stay at home and watch telly, drink tea and smoke ciggies. My kinda chick.

So there I was. After sooking for two years about not being able to hold on to a relationship for more than a weekend, a very attractive and talented woman falls in love with me, sweeps me off my feet and I was over the moon and Jupiter too.

Dramatic pause.

Enter from stage left, Pony Girl.

It’s easy to be light and silly on a blog, but the words in The Kite Runner review (linked above) ring very true.

Pony Girl is back from overseas, is staying in the country briefly (up in the desert, seven hours from me), and heads to Europe indefinitely in April.

I ask you all: Would you swap a potential lifetime with a partner who you really like and may fall in love with, for just one night with one that you already truly love?

I did.

Well, I thought I did, but I ended up getting five nights with Pony Girl, and may get a few more in the Mallee Desert or down in Melbourne or here on the Surf Coast before she goes overseas.

To sleep with Pony Girl is one thing, to talk and laugh for hours and hours is another thing, but for even just one kind word, or a quick squeeze of the hand as she tells me she’s putting the kettle on, or for the privilege to put my arm around her shoulder in public and kiss her forehead, for the privilege to share a space and be partners even if that partnership has a use-by date, to hear her laugh, to make her laugh, for the thrill of even standing in a 5 metre radius of Pony Girl... for these things I broke Andromeda 3.4’s heart.

She deserved better than me.

She may choose to hate my guts. Understandably. I hate my own guts, but in order to man the fuck up I did what had to be done.

And Pony Girl? Don't think (as one good friend has done) that she is some sort of scarlet woman / homewrecker type who waltzed in to my life solely in order to waltz straight back out of it. She understands acutely the brevity of the situation. She hasn't tried to wriggle out of any responsibility towards it. She's far too smart and honourable for that. It's one of the many reasons why I admire her so.

I ain’t good enough a writer to give Pony Girl any justice, and besides, I get a bit tongue-tied near her, and the best I can come up with is this: She rocks.

I’m getting ready for another year of yearning for her. At least I know what to expect because I've already had a year's practice, and the beneficiaries will be the readers of this blog and TSFKA, because I get to go back to my shtick: “Woe is me, I can’t find a good woman, nobody loves me and I can’t cut straight with the chainsaw, I’m hopeless etc etc etc.”

I’m at my artistic best when I’m at my emotional worst. I grew up on vegemite toast and Dostoyevsky.

Anyway, this is a book review blog. The God Delusion was brilliant – finished it in November so sorry for the delay everyone – I give it a B+.

Packing Death

By Lachlan McCulloch



In an earlier blog, I made mention of the fact I read a book solely because the marvellous woman who recommeded it had earlier gifted me some wonderful oral sex.

Similar story here, but just like the Ennuit Mute in my previous post, there was no oral. But there was the lure of it.

See, I had a third date with Project Manager Who Can Do The Splits. Hmm. That nickname is too long. Spiltgirl? Nope, connotations. The Splits? Sounds like a Radiohead album. Miss Splits? Ah, there we go. So anyway, I had a third date with Miss Splits last Sunday night and we went out to a restaurant and afterwards she invited me back to her house for a coffee and I of course said yes. Anyway, we drank coffee and talked and talked and at 11pm, facing a two and a half hour drive to get home, I said, "Well, I better hit the road."

Miss Splits: What?
Perseus: It's a two and a half hour drive, so I should really get going.
Miss Splits: You're kidding?
Perseus Q: Umm...
Miss Splits: It's the third date!
Perseus Q: Umm... oh, I see, umm...
Miss Splits: Oh, whatever. Jesus.

So in a scramble to change the topic I started to rummage through a pile of books next to the couch. They were all true crime and I started babbling away about how the the whole Underbelly thing interested me because it was so Melbourne and all, and anyway, she hand-picked this one out and said, "Oh, you'll really like this one," and I was too much on the backfoot to disagree so I said, "Oh really?" and she urged me to take it and read it so I did.

So as much as I stuffed up the third date, in order to return the book a fourth date is almost a given. It is scheduled for next week.

Did I mention she can do the splits?

So anyway, the book is a true story written by the undercover cop who infiltrated the Pettingill family and because of his excellent work a fair few drug dealers copped massive sentences. There were plenty of 'wearing wires' scenes and bits where they suspected he was undercover but he managed to talk them around and, you know, a couple of scenes were gripping and all, but I read it in under 4 hours and I've already forgotten the author's name.

Good on him though. I'm glad there's people like him around. He's the real hero. Not some schmuck who gets stranded in an ice cave and waits patiently for someone to rescue him. This bloke is an actual hero. But a writer he ain't. What we need is for supercops like this bloke to tell the story, then get Brian Castro or Christos Tsoilkas to write the story or something.

Still, his matter-of-fact writing style means this book can be consumed in one sitting, and would make excellent company beside the pool / sea / sprinkler / fish pond on a summer afternoon.

I'm not marking it.

The Seal Wife

By Kathryn Harrison

(best-selling author of 'The Binding Chair' which I've never heard of)

This is the second in a series of five books I bought for $5 each at The Book Grocer.



Early 1900's, Alaska. A meteorological man from mainland USA gets posted to Alaska to work as a weather-measurer or whatever it's called. Meteorologist.

He meets a mute Ennuit woman, who I shall call Mute One. He follows her home. She won't let him go down on her, but she lets him fuck her as she plays with her clit until she orgasms. They do this every night for months. He takes food to her, she cooks it, they fuck. No oral.

Don't think I'm being crude for the sake of it by the way. It's what's in the book.

Anyway, the mute Ennuit never speaks because she's a mute. You know. And the science / meteorologist dude, well, he talks a lot about his work on pressure systems but he doesn't know if she understands English or not because a) she doesn't really seem to listen to him and b) she's a mute.

One day she vanishes.

So he gets drunk at a dance and fucks a hooker with missing teeth and the hooker steals his money.

Later, he goes back to the same hooker and this time when she tries to take his money he belts her.

Then he develops a crush on the woman who sings at the cinema. He finally meets her. She's a mute as well, so lets call her Mute Two. Though, she's not really a mute because she can sing. But she can't talk because of her bad stutter so she writes down what she wants to say. Anyhoo, he visits her regularly, then when her father goes away they start to have sex and the father suddenly rushes in and says (paraphrasing) "now that you've shagged my daughter you have to marry her." Turns out it was a sting. He doesn't want to marry Mute Two so he avoids her. She smashes up all his temperature measuring things and then she leaves town in violent circumstances.

Luckily for him, Mute One, the eskimo, comes back. He starts fucking her again, but still no oral. The end.

*

For the many Perseus Q scholars out there who study my every word, you'll be aware that in my excellent review of Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' I confessed that I didn't get it. However, I had the good manners to concede that maybe I was too dumb to get it.

Not so this time. I just didn't get it, and I don't think it has anything to do with my intelligence or lack thereof. I just think that whatever it was I was supposed to 'get' is either way too abstract or way too stupid, ergo, it can't be gotten unless you're a sprite or a fool.

Y'see, I can understand a man of civilisation falling for an Ennuit mute. I was ready to accept that this was a book of clashing cultures and the establishment of the USA as a highly conflicted but ultimately benchmarking nation. She could skin rabbits with her bare hands and sew like a Goddess, and he was a modern handyman - a man who could predict weather patterns and thus greatly assist the fledgling economy. The new meets the old and they work together. He's loud and she's quiet but together they present a dignified future for the nation.

I thought that was what I was reading.

But when Mute Two came into it (who wasn't an eskimo), suddenly there was a sexual pattern. The whole 'clash of cultures' fell away and instead I was reading a story of a man's sexual fascination with mutes... written by a woman.

Kathryn Harrison: You don't get men.

Unless! Unless, I've got it all wrong, and there's nothing to get. Maybe she's just into kinky mute sex. Maybe she fantasises about being a mute, and being fucked by a man of science (no oral). Maybe that's it.

So I googled 'sex with mutes' and found one gag about a 'Harposexual' being a person who prefers sex with mutes but will settle for a mime (I didn't laugh, but it is a clever joke) and one post at a sex blog that said this:

"I have a cock with a curve and I've heard no complaints which doesn't mean anything cause I have sex with mutes exclusively. mine doesn't curve left or right but it curves dramatically up. like a 45 degree angle. some girls have said it helped. In that case it sure as hell helped me."

Maybe bendy-cock here should meet up with Kathryn Harrison in a carpark somewhere.


*

The book was alright, I suppose. Meaningless, but, you know, I kept reading. The stuff about the weather was actually the most interesting bit.

I give it a D+

Leviticus

By Some Idiot

*

This is the third and final part of my 'Apocalyptic Mess' series of reviews.

But before we get going, here's a slide show.

*


A sunny afternoon break at home... I might sit at the kitchen table.



Where's the lighter?



"And if the burnt sacrifice for his offering to the LORD be of fowls, then he shall bring his offering of turtle doves, or of young pigeons. And the priest shall bring it unto the altar..." This is so boring.



"And when any will offer a meat offering unto the LORD, his offering shall be of fine flour; and he shall pour oil on it, and put frankincense thereon..." Hang on. Wouldn't the frankincense ruin the smell?



"And every oblation of thy meat offering shalt thou season with salt; neither shalt thou suffer the salt of the covenant of thy God to be lacking from thy meat offering: with all thy offerings thou shalt offer salt." Well, God is clearer on that than he is about homsexuality. Note to the religious: Salt everything!



Fuck. This is like a cookbook from Hell.



Hmm, Leviticus 11:17 reckons that the 'little owl' is an abomination. Ramon Insertnamehere will agree.



Wait, so if you come across a leper, the Priest has to actually yell: "Unclean! Unclean!" God this is fucked. This is doing my head in.


Ooh! The cricket's on!


*

I am going to open my review of Leviticus (which I stupidly read three times, just trying to get my head around it) with a lengthy extract. Perhaps make a cuppa, settle yourself in, and take your time reading this. It is a large slab taken from Chapter 26 of Leviticus - the last chapter, and it is God's words. In this extract he explains what he will do to you if you don't abide by his rules, as detailed in the previous chapters of Leviticus (which I will come to after the extract.)

You ready? Here goes. Leviticus 26: 14-38

14 But if ye will not hearken unto me, and will not do all these commandments;

15 And if ye shall despise my statutes, or if your soul abhor my judgments, so that ye will not do all my commandments, but that ye break my covenant:

16 I also will do this unto you; I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart: and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it.

17 And I will set my face against you, and ye shall be slain before your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you; and ye shall flee when none pursueth you.

18 And if ye will not yet for all this hearken unto me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins.

19 And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass:

20 And your strength shall be spent in vain: for your land shall not yield her increase, neither shall the trees of the land yield their fruits.

21 And if ye walk contrary unto me, and will not hearken unto me; I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins.

22 I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number; and your high ways shall be desolate.

23 And if ye will not be reformed by me by these things, but will walk contrary unto me;

24 Then will I also walk contrary unto you, and will punish you yet seven times for your sins.

25 And I will bring a sword upon you, that shall avenge the quarrel of my covenant: and when ye are gathered together within your cities, I will send the pestilence among you; and ye shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy.

26 And when I have broken the staff of your bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver you your bread again by weight: and ye shall eat, and not be satisfied.

27 And if ye will not for all this hearken unto me, but walk contrary unto me;

28 Then I will walk contrary unto you also in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins.

29 And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat.

30 And I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images, and cast your carcases upon the carcases of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you.

31 And I will make your cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries unto desolation, and I will not smell the savour of your sweet odours.

32 And I will bring the land into desolation: and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it.

33 And I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you: and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste.

34 Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths, as long as it lieth desolate, and ye be in your enemies' land; even then shall the land rest, and enjoy her sabbaths.

35 As long as it lieth desolate it shall rest; because it did not rest in your sabbaths, when ye dwelt upon it.

36 And upon them that are left alive of you I will send a faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee, as fleeing from a sword; and they shall fall when none pursueth.

37 And they shall fall one upon another, as it were before a sword, when none pursueth: and ye shall have no power to stand before your enemies.

38 And ye shall perish among the heathen, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up.

Oh man, how cool is that? See, this is why I love the Bible. It is written exquisitely, and with such evilness and spite and it delivers such forceful language and concepts. If I encountered the most hideous and sick criminal, never would I have been able to conjure such an imaginative punishment for him as "...ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat."

And what a remarkable character the LORD, Yahweh, is! He's like Darth Vader multiplied by a zillion..."I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images, and cast your carcases upon the carcases of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you." Bwahahahahaha!

It's powerful and inventive stuff and at times a delight to read; up there with Shakespeare even, and I am fortunate to be an atheist who can read this and feel nothing but entertained.

But of course, herein lies the problem. 'The Bible' is taken very seriously by many millions of people as a divine document. We swear by The Bible in court. It is placed in hotel rooms, in courts, in parliaments. It is 'holy' in the minds of many who, in its name, have fought wars, and killed, and maimed, and stopped homosexuals from getting married, and insisted they teach Creation in science classes.

And so the religious, if they do believe The Bible is in fact the divine word of God, must take God's threats seriously. He will chastise you for your sins, so you better do what he says to do, and avoid doing what he says not to do, otherwise you may have to eat your children.

But don't panic, because the preceding 25 chapters of Leviticus contains all his rules so if you study them, you'll know what to do and what not to do.

For instance: Homosexuals? Abomination! You're fucked. Very clear on this. "Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is abomination." (18:22).

But the LORD is even clearer on who else is fucked, and they are no more or less fucked than the gays.

Those who get drunk in a church (10:8)
Those who touch a dead camel (11:8)
Those who eat a bat (11:9)
Those who touch a woman who has given birth in the last week (12:6)
Those men who don't have a shower after ejaculating (15:16)
Those who touch a woman menstruating (15:19-20)
Those who eat blood from anything (presumably, the meat should be cooked well) (17:10)
Those who ask a woman to get naked if she's menstruating (18:19)
Those who eat from a fruit tree that is not more than three years old (19:23)
Those with tattoos (19:28)
Those men who get naked with a woman that is menstruating (20:18)
Wizards (20:27)
Anyone who works on the Sabbath (too many references to list)

If you fall into any of the above categories you're likely to have God's face set against you and be slain before your enemies.

Please understand and appreciate this. The above rules (plucked from about 1,000 rules contained in Leviticus) are given no more or less importance than the homosexual issue, which brings me to something that has been noted many times before but I now want to give it a name: The Great Christian Squirm.

The Great Christian Squirm (GCS) is prevalent amongst all the religious except for maybe those nutters who hang about with the 'God Hates Fags' signs at US army funerals (they are the only True Believers I can name).

The GCS is when anybody both religious and who think the Bible is holy, whether they be fundamentalist or recreational, pick and choose. "Homosexuality is wrong," they may say, but have they eaten fruit from a tree less than three years old? Have they touched their wives after giving birth? Because as I say, Leviticus is clear on both topics. So they squirm out of it by saying, "Oh, but that's the Old Testament, and you have to look at the Ancient Greek translation of the word 'fruit', oh and Jesus changed everything and umm, you have to put Leviticus in context of the times and ummm..."

You can't have it both ways, dudes. Either the book is the Holy and Divine Word of the everlasting creator LORD, or it isn't. Either you take it ALL, or you take none of it, so if you even dare say, "It is okay to touch my wife after she gives birth," then I say to you, "Then you cannot have Creation, you cannot have The Ten Commandments, you cannot have Noah's Ark and you cannot have the Resurrection."

It is also in Leviticus that slavery is given the go-ahead:

"Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession." (25:44-45)

I would suggest that all religions, at least in Western society, these days find slavery abhorrent. But there it is, in the Holy Bible. Watch them squirm. Watch them tell you that that bit no longer applies, but that other bit does.

Sorry Christians. If you're telling me that Mary was a virgin, then I can have slaves.

*

As a stand-alone book Leviticus is a dismal faiure. Moses the dumb-arse is on Mt Sinai and God is telling him his rules. That's kinda it. Chapter 26 with all the evil bits is the only entertaining part because the rest of it is rule after rule after rule. It's an empty book - empty of relevancy, empty of entertainment, empty of art. The first eleven chapters is all about burnt offerings... how to slaughter the lamb or the goat or the ox or whatever, which parts you can eat and which parts you can't, when to offer a lamb and when to offer a turtle dove and so on. There's a few chapters on leprosy and boils, a bit about some extra piety required of the Priests and repeated over and over and over is shit about the Sabbath. I tell ya: Moses must have had a keen memory to remember all these rules. It's not like he was taking dictation or anything.

There's only one 'story' in the whole book, in chapter 24, concerning a little half-caste kid in the tribe who blasphemes. God tells Moses to have the kid murdered. "And Moses spoke to the children of Israel , that they should bring forth him that had cursed out of the camp, and stone him with stones. And the children of Israel did as the LORD commanded Moses." (24:23)

Leviticus is of no interest to anyone really, except for maybe orthodox Jews who want to stick to their kosher cooking and need to know when all the holy days on the Jewish calendar are. That's all it is. The whole fucking Leviticus is just one boring and irrelevant rule after another rule.

There are some nice rules that God laid down, though they are few and far between. One which I can't find now was a very direct commandment to be nice to kids and I appreciated that, even though in Exodus God was quite happy for kids to be murdered as long as they were Gyppos. There was also some stuff about looking after family and neighbours if they encounter financial misfortune... you know, like, give them a job, or lend them money, and feed them, and that was nice, but, all in all, it was mainly about how to prepare meat. That's the over-riding and dominant feature of Leviticus, followed a close second by Sabbath rules.

So why did I read it three times? Well, bereft of art, entertainment and relevancy, I found it interesting that we, us humans, as a people, as a species, are capable of believing this stuff to be Holy. I had to keep reading to appreciate how truly bizarre we are. Humans are a fantastic bunch. We are capable of anything.

Night

By Elie Wiesel

This is Part Two of a three part series of reviews sub-titled 'Apocalyptic Mess'.

It is also Part One of a series of five reviews of books I purchased for only $5 a book at the wonderful Book Grocer.



This is an account of the writer's time in a Nazi concentration camp.

I am not Jewish, or religious. I am not German, or Polish. I am not an ethnic supremacist, or belong to a persecuted minority. I am not a child of war, I have not lived in a war zone, I have not been sent to a war. I have not lost any member of my immediate family to a violent death.

Who am I to comment on this story?

I can only understand the holocaust in either political or philosophical terms. And of course by 'understand' I mean 'not understand'.

I'm just another voice who in exasperation, at the loss of anything else to add just says, "Lest we forget."

In my review of Blood Meridian I complained that, "It describes an implausible humanity, so detatched from the land and the laws of existance that it fails to inspire any form of reminisce. It is unrecognisable as coming from Earth. It is not our story."

That's why this book is so horrible. Because it is our story. It comes from Earth. People reasoned a genocide. They used the word 'solution'. Unlike the cartoon directionless psychopaths in Blood Meridian, these people had a reason for their actions. Some people, in time, made a reason for genocide.

I can't score this book. I won't.

This is not a book to read because you want to, it's a book to read because you have to.

Blood Meridian

By Cormac McCarthy



This review is part one of a series of three reviews to be posted in the next few days under the sub-title ‘Apocalyptic Mess’.

Being that I discovered McCarthy early in the year via ‘No Country For Old Men’ and ‘The Road’, and being that I also fostered an appreciation for Western movies in the past six months or so, it seemed fitting to wind up these two interests with a western by Cormac McCarthy (before moving on to my next phase, whatever that is).

I was looking forward to this book, especially because many McCarthy fans (including our comrade ‘Tiger In A Tube’ ) nominated it as his best work.

Here it is: An amoral 14 year old sociopath known only as ‘the kid’ joins a mob of violent scalp-hunters, lead by a sadistic maniac called Glanton and an enigmatic Kurtz-like hairless man known as ‘the judge’ who may or may not exist.

By jesus it was violent.

...one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew...

And gory.

...those right pilgrims nameless among the stones with their terrible wounds, the viscera spilled from their sides and the naked torsos bristling with arrowshafts. Some by their beards were men but yet wore strange menstrual wounds between their legs and no man’s parts for these had been cut away and hung dark and strange from out of their grinning mouths.

McCarthy dishes up many impossibly long sentences.

They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawn-broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses’ legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren plan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.

And describes a landscape that is alien to me, I think.

They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wild-flowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia and deep purple gentian...

Using words I’ve never heard (dictionary.com and wiki - thankyou).

Under a gibbous moon horse and rider spanceled to their shadows...

*

The book is gripping and moving but that’s all I can say in support of it. They're like a band of Ivan Milats lead by Kierkegaard’s evil twin from a parallel universe running around mid 19th Century USA/Mexico brewing their own mini-holocaust by senselessly slaughtering and scalping Mexicans, pilgrims and Injuns. Did I mention how violent it is?

The judge is the best character, even though his soliloquies make little sense, and even though he may not exist (is he the kid's mind's creation? Is he Satan?). He’s a bisexual, a pedophile, he's highly educated, multi-lingual and one of the more sadistic characters of fiction. His habit of making sketches of artefacts (whether they be an old shack or an animal or a child or whatever) before killing/destroying them is a fascinating quirk.

Coming across ancient Indian rock-carvings:

The rocks about in every sheltered place were covered with ancient paintings and the judge was soon among them copying out those certain ones into his book...

...then he rose and with a piece of broken chert he scrappled away one of the designs, leaving no trace of it only a raw place on the stone where it had been.

His only explanation for this is:

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

And in relation to his extreme sadism, he offers:

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him.

But the main chracater is the kid who, in the absence of anything better to do, joins this gang of murderers. We follow the kid’s formative years but when he joins the gang, we actually lose him as a central character for about 150 pages. At first this bugged me, but I realised in the end that it was McCarthy’s greatest literary achievement in the book. By dropping the kid out of the narrative we could watch everything that was happening just as the kid was experiencing it. By the time he's freed from the gang and we’re back into his mind, we understand his trauma and total inability to cooperate with the world. Maybe McCarthy shut us out from his thoughts for 150 pages because he had none. Maybe. For, had he got to figurin' things, maybe he'd make a lousy genocidal maniac. Or maybe McCarthy just wanted us to concentrate on the horror.

*

I can see why the book is lauded. It’s a massive and profound work. But, I have a problem with it.

Germaine Greer in her brilliant essay, ‘Whitefella Jump Up’ (I don't care what you say or whether you agree with her essay or not... Greer’s concept is brilliant and important) she posits that:

We hate this country because we cannot allow ourselves to love it. We know in our hearts' core that it is not ours.

But offers this as a way of overcoming it:

If we climbed out of the recreational vehicle and sat on the ground, we might begin to get the message that we can't afford to hear, the message that, since contact, Aborigines have never stopped transmitting. The land is the source of everything;

I argue that Greer is a writer who speaks in the language of myth. I might write an essay on this one day. In short, my summary of her life’s work is that she talks in an ancient and abstract tongue, and too many attack her because they try to understand her in the context of current affairs, hard news and facts. It’s not what she’s about – or at least, it’s not what she means to me. When Greer said, “The animal kingdom got its revenge,” she was not saying (as the hopelessly stupid Helen Razer insinuated) that the animal kingdom got together and hatched a plan to kill Steve Irwin. She was in fact rising to Irwin’s own mythological ubermensch ‘The Crocodile Hunter’ with words appropriate to that mythical superhero's death. They got their revenge on the Crocodile Hunter, not the husband / father.

Same goes with her use of the words (above) ‘hate’ and ‘land is the source of everything’.

I know what she means. At least I think I do. We are as much a product of the land we inhabit as we are our genetic breeding and our expreiences and circumstance. We store within us all that is abstract and transcedental as well as material in these matters. And yet, we deny it, or at best, try to ignore it, but we cannot escape it.

As such, we are a cocktail of both nature's peril and beauty.

Which brings me back to Blood Meridian. I cannot accept such amorality. It is inferred that both circumstance and land created these monsters, but there was no let up. Glanton cared for a dog. That's all we got. The rest cared for nobody and nothing. They existed trapped in one dimension only - as psychopathic maniacs and had no other traits. A glimpse of camaraderie here, a hint of self-awareness there, all to be eradicated a minute later. It’s not good enough to say: “As long as they were employed to slaughter injuns, they couldn’t afford another dimension”, because, hell, even Ivan Milat may have liked ice-cream or Bon Jovi or something.

In a way, they act on the Greer model – they tear up the country that is not theirs by slaughtering the people that are its custodians, but unlike the Greer model, there is no redemption or lesson, nothing to reflect upon, no message in the dirt or the wildflowers, no second to sigh at a sunset or admire the guile of the wolf or the resilience of the quarrey.

The nearest I’ll come to saying something religious is to concede that there is something in the dirt upon which we are raised that melds to us. Human nature is inextricably linked with nature full stop. Physics, biology, geology are siblings to philosophy, art and human experience.

Maybe that's why my tolerance of religion and new-age spiritualism is ZERO, and why I find it all to be abhorrent, childish nonsense. Because it assumes we belong to Jesus, or the Lord, or to some other sentient designer such as the new-age cosmos with its reliance on fate, destiny, 'meant to happen' fucking garbage junk philosophy, and that souls or spirits exist on higher plains extraneous to the planet on which we are rooted to... all these beliefs, whether they be Christian, Islamic or Wiccan remove us from the land, from our experience, from our instinct and most importantly, from the magic that is life. They are trying to relocate us to a place that cannot and does not exist.

We cannot help but belong to the land - the laws governing our existance insist on this and the human mind on some transcedental level knows it and works with it. The same laws apply to all of us and we offer varying results and interpretations back. Blood Meridian lacks this. Just like the Old Testament, it peddles an absolute that's beyond our potential. It describes an implausible humanity, so detatched from the land and the laws of existance that it fails to inspire any form of reminisce. It is unrecognisable as coming from Earth. It is not our story.

But it was cracking entertainment.

B Minus.

Glossary just from the extracts above (fairdinkum, every page had some word I didn't know).

Midden: Dunghill or refuge heap.

Fontanel: One of the spaces, covered by membrane, between the bones of the fetal or young skull.

Viscera: The organs in the cavities of the body, esp. those in the abdominal cavity.

Spume: Foam, froth, or scum.

Weft: A woven fabric or garment

Groundsel: Any composite plant of the genus Senecio, esp. S. vulgaris, a common weed having clusters of small yellow disk flowers without rays.


Zinnia: Any of several composite plants of the genus Zinnia, native to Mexico and adjacent areas, esp. the widely cultivated species Z. elegans, having variously colored, many-rayed flower heads.


Gentian: any of several plants of the genera Gentiana, Gentianella, and Gentianopsis, having usually blue, or sometimes yellow, white, or red, flowers, as the fringed gentian of North America.


Gibbous: (of a heavenly body) Convex at both edges, as the moon when more than half full.

Spancel: a noosed rope with which to hobble an animal, esp. a horse or cow. In his case, he has made a verb of it.

Chert: A compact rock consisting essentially of microcrystalline quartz

*

Apologies to Tiger In A Tube because this is the second novel listed in his Top Eleven of which I've had ill words to say. But he'll forgive me because us Richmond supporters, in the lack of success, only have dignity left.