Veterans of the weirdy tape and/or mail art scene may recall former Ceramic Hob pStan Batcow as the prime mover behind Howl in the Typewriter and Pumf Records. He's been at it since the eighties, and not only has he failed to slow down a bit, as many of us have done, but if anything he appears to be accelerating. This is his first novel, although it doesn't read like a first novel having arguably spent at least four decades in the making with many of the texts found herein originating as Stanzines, as he deemed them - short zines of Batcow fiction or simple rumination periodically produced by the man seemingly because he just couldn't stop himself. I had a couple here and there, notably This Bleeding Heart which doesn't seem to have made it into the novel and which I remember as noteworthy. So the prose and general composition are confident and accomplished as the work of a man who found his voice - as the saying has it - many years before. This ain't his first rodeo.
The premise has a group of people monitored as they sleep, their dreams recorded herein towards ambiguous ends. It's structured pretty much as a loose tangle of unrelated lengths of super-8mm film edited together into a single continuous strand, and it would be fair to call it an experimental novel; although unlike a few experimental novels I've encountered of late, this experiment is undertaken by someone who has some idea of what the fuck he's doing. We meet our cast as the book opens, learn what they're about to do, and the rest is one individual testimony after another - either unrelated, or related by means which aren't immediately obvious. Former Stanzines appear as Rachel dreams about reading them in a library, which is cheeky as fuck in compositional terms but the material blends beautifully into the whole regardless. We alternate autobiographical musings with surrealism and punky philosophy and somehow it all hangs together as a sort of social realist Naked Lunch written under the influence of Lewis Carroll, amongst others. It kicks against the pricks while remaining generally humanist and refreshingly low on the kind of cynicism to which the Batcow might be entitled given a few of the more obviously autobiographical details. Themes emerging may depend on where the reader is sat, and I found something generally positive with a firm grounding in reality amounting to we're all in this together so let's not be arseholes, as proposed by our narrator's thoughts as he observes a couple of rats.
The crouching rat hadn't moved, but he sensed that it was very aware of his presence. It was plainly terrified, but resisting its natural instinct to flee. In a bizarre moment of empathy, he realised that these rats were mates, and the one lying dead was being watched over, protected posthumously by its loyal and mourning consort.
It was a touching tableau, sorrowful yet a somehow uplifting scenario. He was witnessing something that seemed to mirror what should be the very meaning of existence - something that should be duplicated in spirit as the blueprint for a perfect world.
It's a weird one, as might be expected of such an assemblage, but it holds together beautifully even if it isn't always obvious why, effortlessly drawing the reader though to the point at which it ceases to feel like random images.
Buy as many copies as you can afford here.
No comments:
Post a Comment