I picked up an uncorrected proof copy of Pygmy at a crib I was staying at for a holiday from the quakes and was immediately excited. The prospect of the clue finding otherworldliness of Chuck’s writing had me salivating – and it delivered in spades up to a point, but remained ultimately unsatisfying because the promise simply didn’t live up to the set-up.
Plot is something that emerges in Chuck’s books. Fight Club has so much twist and convolution that I was simply hanging on and enjoying the read as I became absorbed in the story almost without realising it, only to be sucker-punched by the big reveal.
Pygmy has something similar going on with the variation being the big reveal is pretty much revealed in the beginning with the obvious promise of more to come. In an article Chuck wrote about payoffs in fiction called Hiding the Gun he calls the device ‘basic’, ‘obvious’ and even ‘dumb’. Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy technique to master. The form of the book shows Chuck’s hand: it’s the diary of a secret agent, trained since childhood to infiltrate the US via a bogus student exchange programme on a mission, code named Operation Havoc, to destroy America from the inside. It’s a bit like Project Mayhem, but not so much that it grates. It’s not all it seems in Pygmy though. In a book that’s essentially about how power is gained and maintained the big conflict is set up not only between nations with the eponymous Pygmy’s un-named country pitted against the US, but also on the domestic level with Pygmy against his host family.
This puts Pygmy in the same company as Donna Tartt’s debut The Secret History, and it’s a demanding technique; telling the reader right off the bat what the core of the plot is and then leading them down the historical path to that point and beyond it. In Donna’s skilled hands Bunny Corcoran’s death takes on more aspects than a cat has hair and the consequences in beautifully rendered Tragic style show much more than the opening reveal could have even hinted at. Masterly writing. By the time I caught up with Pygmy’s scheme in the main narrative thrust the big totalitarian plot hinted at wasn’t as big as I had imagined, nor did it have the far-reaching thematic spread I was sure was waiting just out of sight.
This makes Pygmy’s reveal frustrating in comparison because it becomes a smaller book than the plants hint at. Pygmy’s historical recollections do little to penetrate the opacity of Pygmy’s motivations. The satires on American consumerism, teenage commoditised sexuality and power structures, and revivalist religion don’t hit hard. Perhaps because they are such ‘big, dumb’ targets.
It doesn’t sit well beside morbid dystopian visions like The Handmaid’s Tale, which sticks the pig of American conservative Christianity like no other novel. Margaret Atwood creates a society as monstrous as it is bland and joyless. The cruel ironies and flagrant hypocrisies are so rank they are institutionalised. Publisher Jonathan Cape describes Pygmy’s mid-western host family as Simpson-esque. Chuck’s own website calls the book The Manchurian Candidate meets South Park. Somehow in comparing the book to cartoons that have outraged the public at various times with satire so vicious it has made peeps squeak, Pygmy manages to come off second best.
The fabulous aspect of the Americanization of Pygmy is how despite his ruthless indoctrination, he just wants to fit in. He wants to be liked, just like anyone else. Hitler, much quoted by Pygmy’s ideologue masters, peddled only hate, a pride in ‘otherness’ and revenge. That he got so far with that is surprising in a way. Jesus and Buddha, both notably absent from Pygmy’s bank of quotations, went a lot further and have more influence talking about love, self-realisation and unity. Without knowing it, that’s what Pygmy chose in the finish.
The most striking aspect of the book is the use of English by the protagonist. Pygmy speaks in translationese, and I am a fan. I adore the European daftness in translating the vernacular literally, the overly complex syntax of the Chinese and especially the unwitting poetry of Japanese writers in English. Humour, irony, tragic failure to communicate and again, American buffoonery come across deftly in Pygmy’s broken Broken English. There again, however there are inevitable comparisons and Chuck’s writing doesn’t fare well. Anthony Burgess’ brilliant Russian influenced slang in A Clockwork Orange effectively echoes thematic disgust with socialism, predicated on an assumed Soviet victory in the Cold War. It also provides a violent and sonically new onomatopoeia: tolchock is a vivid word-image for a heavy blow; droogs, so drone-like in its visual rhyme, makes Alex’s mates so much more the brainless followers in this one word than pages of description and allusion could ever do. And how about James Joyce’s tragicomic overhauling of the language? Arguably there could be no Clockwork Orange without Ulysses.
These are big shoes and when writers walk in them I want them to give me a distinct gait. Tread the same path, by all means, but show me a different view. In Modernist art Marcel Duchamp hung a urinal on a gallery wall and called it art. It took 90 years before Michael Parekowhai produced a truly profound response that wasn’t simply a variation on the same theme. In his work Mimi (1994) there is dialogue with Duchamp, asserting that anyone going into this territory is simply a copyist and that one may as well produce objects like that on an industrial scale if that is all you are doing.The word ‘mimi’ in Te Reo Maori means ‘to piss’; this also plays on the French word ‘mimer’: ‘to copy’. In choosing the form that is familiar to many, the plastic framed do-it-yourself kitset, Parekowhai comments on colonialist received notions of art in the Pacific. Import an Airfix (say) model aeroplane kitset from England and you have an English conceived and executed object reflecting English aspirations. Your only contribution is to put it together according to the maker’s directions and there’s your objet d’art. And that is all such endless repetitions of received notions are worth. Art that comes from the core is personal, particular and resonates all over the world.
Am I wanting too much? Where Chuck is concerned I don’t think I am. Fight Club is searing, visceral and grotesque. Image after image of values and morals twisted and butchered and shockingly recognisable. This is what we’ve come to. Beyond caring, the characters stumble from one ghastly situation to the next looking for something to stimulate their anaesthetised senses. It’s the same world in Pygmy. The rituals are subjected to a gaze through a lens of political hatred and yet they don’t fare as badly as they do in Fight Club. The middle path seems to be the one that will win out here.
No comments:
Post a Comment