Mario Sabino, The Day I Killed My Father
Scribe; $27.95; 183pp
Peter Murphy, John the Revelator
Faber; $29.95; 254pp
Philipp Meyer, American Rust
Allen & Unwin; $32.99; 367pp
In life, human beings predict the weather. In fiction, the weather predicts human beings, is pressed into service to establish mood, to portend disaster or some sinister incident, or simply to move the action along. It can also provide a telling contrast. Here, for example, is the opening sentence of Mario Sabino’s The Day I Killed My Father:
The day I killed my father was a bright day, although the light was hazy, without shadows or contours.
Note if you will how the conventional coupling of bad weather and bad events is here decisively and knowingly subverted, such that the contrast between the brightness of the day and the darkness of the deed runs in perfect parallel to the contrast between the languid prose, with its tone of contented reminiscence, and the nature of the act recalled. The weather, or rather the narrator’s reference to it, tells us all we need to know. Here, clearly, is a psychopath.
Moving through the paragraph, however, we find that we’ve been slightly misled. ‘Or perhaps it was grey,’ our narrator continues,
that shade of grey which even tinges souls that are not usually inclined to melancholy. It’s strange that this is the only detail I don’t remember; all the others are still vivid. But why does it matter? The frame, that’s all it was – the frame. Why try to jolt nature out of its indifference towards us humans?
Of course, this does nothing to shake our conviction that Sabino’s narrator is a cold-hearted killer; after all, he’s just confessed to patricide and here he is discussing the niceties. But that’s not all he’s discussing, is it? He’s also discussing fiction itself, attempting to second guess the reader prone to flatulent speculations about the uses of weather in literature. Here, indeed, we have an instance of what is called, in the critical community, ‘metafiction’ or ‘self-reflexivity’. This is no ordinary psychopath – oh no. This, dear reader, is a postmodern psychopath.
And The Day I Killed My Father is a postmodern novel, albeit one in which the self-reflexivity is fundamental to the narrative and not, as so often, merely tricksy or arbitrary. For what makes this debut novel distinctive is that the reader has a role to play. The narrator is seeing an analyst, and it is to her – or rather to us – that he addresses himself throughout the novel, explaining his complicated relationship with his parents and the events leading up to the murder of his father, and inviting us, early on in the novel, to read an unfinished novel of his own that may or may not throw some light on his motives. This unfinished novel is entitled Future and is incorporated into the text. Thus it is that our narrator/patient leads us down several interpretative dead ends, amusing himself at our expense: ‘You’d make a great literary critic, you know. You’ve perfected the art of saying nothing while creating the impression that you’re saying everything.’ Well then, moving swiftly on …
As is clear from the opening sentence, The Day I Killed My Father is not a whodunit. Rather, it’s a whydeedoit, contained within which is a fascinating, if somewhat arcane, dissertation on evil. Was our narrator driven to patricide by personality, circumstances, a dangerous philosophical scheme or some combination of all of these elements? On the face of it, his experience would appear to follow the trajectory of the Oedipus myth. As a child, he was saved by his father from drowning, an act he regards as a humiliation, since it causes mum, in whose affection he basks, to romantically reconcile with dad, her husband. Nightmares and fits of dizziness ensue, as does an unbecoming fondness for humiliating his father in front of his mother by exposing his intellectual shortcomings. It is not giving too much away, I hope, to say that his father’s final ‘revenge’ is the immediate trigger for the titular parricide. Of course, all of this is courtesy of our patient and as such is to be treated with the utmost caution.
Indeed, the novel within the novel would seem to raise the possibility that the murder was something more ‘high-minded’. This novel features a character called Antonym, whose name is the result of a clerical error (the registrar typed a superfluous m), while also being a writerly clue to the dialectical nature of the theory espoused by Antonym’s friend, Hemistich, a poet and critic turned restaurateur. For this theory concerns the nature of Evil, which, argues Hemstitch, is not Good’s opposite but rather its philosophical twin. Thus the narrator’s scarily cool description of his father’s murder in terms of a religious ritual – ‘Folded over himself, he received the second blow – the chrism that confirms the baptism’ – begins to look more than just incongruous. Might the murder have been an act of worship?
Sabino is a Brazilian author and this book is a translation from the Portuguese. Whether it’s a good translation I can’t say, but certainly this version is extremely well written, as I think the use of the passive voice in the description of the father’s murder (‘he received the second blow’) makes plain, conveying as it does not only the sense of something splendid and ceremonial but also a sort of slow-motion dreadfulness. It is also absorbing, and at times quite funny, and it left me feeling decidedly spooked.
From a death inflicted on a sunny day to a birth come to pass on a rainy one: Peter Murphy’s debut novel, John the Revelator, begins as follows:
I was born in a storm. My mother said the thunder was so loud she flinched when it struck, strobes of lightning and slam-dancing winds and volleys of rain for hours until it blew itself out and sloped off like a spent beast.
Thus does the reader touch down in Ireland, a witness to the birth of the eponymous John, surname Devine, as in John the Divine, John the Apostle, John the Revelator. Thus, also, does he find himself in a madness quite unlike the madness, if madness it is, of Sabino’s narrator – which is to say the ‘old Celtic madness’, memorably described by Anthony Burgess as ‘a poetic confusion of the real and the imagined’. For while John the Revelator takes its title from a classic of American Blues, its atmosphere is distinctly Irish, a blend of Roman Catholicism, the Faerie world and Fenian myth, with a bit of black magic thrown in for good measure. ‘Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry’, wrote W. H. Auden in his elegy for Yeats, adding: ‘Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still.’ Here, at the start of Murphy’s novel, both the madness and the weather coalesce in a way that underscores the promise of apocalypse in the novel’s title.
John lives with his mother, Lily, a heavy smoker with her feet on the ground, her head in the bible and her heart in the Sixties. A semi-permanent presence in the house is a quare old bird called Mrs Nagle, a bible-quoting, -toting old biddy, whose name, I notice, is an anagram of ‘angel’. It is, however, the angel of death, in the form of a dream-invading crow, that fires the young boy’s imagination, seeming to cast a sinister shadow over his, or perhaps the world’s, future. Jumping forward to John’s mid teens, this sense of foreboding reaches its climax when a local youth called Jamey Corboy, an unpretentiously sophisticated loner with a gift for turning his life into fiction, suggests that they make a short film. The proposed title for this bit of fun is ‘Merde a Dieu!’ (‘Shit on God’: Arthur Rimbaud’s famous graffito), and during its shooting John appears to suffer some kind of mental fit, desecrating the local church – an act of vandalism for which Jamey takes the rap. Meanwhile, Lily is taken ill, Mrs Nagle moves in with John and the novel rumbles towards its stormy denouement.
So what does John the Revelator reveal? I confess to having no idea, though am none the less impressed for that. For what the novel’s author reveals, and reveals in spades, is a wonderful ear – indeed, an almost bardic flair. His prose is simply a joy to read. Whether it’s the little local effects – the ‘parched bark’ of Lilly’s cough or the ‘big black bastard of a hobo crow’ – or the italicised passages of dream description – ‘He spirals out of a hole in the belly of heaven from which the angered gods cast him, to helicopter-hover, bone tired and hungry and scanning for carrion’ – the language has an almost tangible quality; it seems to bubble on the page, like Braille. If the poets Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney had ever collaborated on a work of fiction it would have had something of this book’s texture. An example, chosen (almost) at random:
Surf roared in my ears. The sky grumbled thunder, silencing the gulls. I gazed out across the sloblands and took a slug of whiskey from Har’s hip flask, so bone-weary I feared I’d faint. The light had a brittle quality that made the eyeballs ache; fingers of blue electricity played about the glinting, flinty stones scattered on the strand.
I see it’s turned out portentous again.
There is nothing portentous or obviously symbolic about the storm in Philipp Meyer’s debut novel American Rust. It does, however, drive the principals towards a disused industrial building and as such precipitates the act of violence that shifts the narrative into gear. For it is here, amidst the rusting remnants of America’s failing industrial base, that Isaac lobs a large ball bearing at the head of a local bum called Otto in an attempt to save his friend, Billy, from him and his associates. Perhaps not entirely unsymbolically, Otto seems to ‘fall straight down, a building collapsing on itself’.
This all happens in the wooded environs of the fictional town of Buell, Pennsylvania. Isaac English is a local youth who cares for his father, Henry English, whose wife, Isaac’s mother, has committed suicide. Billy Poe is Isaac’s friend and lives with his mother, Grace, in a caravan. Isaac is the thoughtful type, given to existential musings. Billy is the model jock, given to a bit of biffo. Indeed, it is Poe who is fingered for Otto’s murder, and not even the local police chief, Bud Harris, who has bent over backwards for Billy in the past (Bud is romantically involved with Grace), can save him from a spell in gaol. Meanwhile, Isaac goes on the run, which is sort of what he was doing anyway, having stolen $4000 from his father in an attempt to get to California and become the man he might have been had he not been lumbered with nursing the old man.
Essentially, this is a novel about bad choices. Billy should have gone to college in order to pursue his football career. Isaac should never have stayed in Buell. Lee, his sister, should never have left. And America has made bad choices too. This, indeed, is the thinking, or the judgment, behind the novel’s central metaphor, which grows, as it were, organically from the consequences of one of those choices, which is to say the choice to neglect America’s industry in pursuit of a quick buck. Buell is a former steel-making town. Now it isn’t. Steel rusts. Rust causes things to fall apart. It’s all a bit too obvious, and even Meyer seems dimly aware that his informing metaphor is dead on arrival. ‘In the end it was rust’, thinks Lee at one point. ‘That was what defined this place. A brilliant observation. She was probably about the ten millionth person to think it.’
The real problem with this novel, however, is Meyer’s decision to spread his bets and attempt to render the particular texture of every character’s consciousness through a blend of first- and third-person narration – a decidedly clunky, or rusty, version of the free indirect style championed by James Wood. This is not only irritating, it also has the unfortunate effect of making everyone ‘sound’ the same – everyone, that is to say, except Isaac, whose vigorous mind and existential bent demand far greater energy, which Meyer provides by way of short sentences and by holding back on the function words. Consequently, Isaac is doubly irritating:
You are going crazy, he thought. Young man you have plugged Science into the hole left by God. Your mother had the opposite problem: plugged God into a hole left by … Except she took the secret with her. Chose the next world over this one. A slight flaw in her plan – where is she now? Just darkness. If that is what nonexistence is.
Some novels merely contain heavy weather. This one, by contrast, is heavy weather.
