Monkey droppings - The Warhol Gang by Peter Darbyshire - "My mind is full of other people's mottos."

The Monkey ponders the irony of writing about anti-consumer literature on a Mac.

Life is too short for such imponderables.


The Warhol Gang
by Peter Darbyshire (2010)

I wander the mall to distract myself from whatever's wrong with me. The mall's tunnels go everywhere in the city - under the streets, up through walkways connecting office towers, into bus-station lobbies and hospital cafeterias. I don't think the mall has a beginning or an end. The mall is a part of everything or maybe everything is a part of the mall. Whatever I need is in the mall. Food courts. Clothing stores. Cinemas. I never have to leave the mall.

I don't believe Peter Darbyshire to be the greatest fan of consumerism. Not at all.

Neither is Chuck Palahniuk, at least in Fight Club (a novel that, like it or not, The Warhol Gang is inevitably going to be compared to). But as fresh and unusual as Fight Club was (and still is, I firmly believe it holds up), Palahniuk's other works have slowly but inexorably drifted into self-parody, most evident in the lazy, trite, wafer-thin, oh-so-irredeemably-bloody-awful Tell-All. Seriously, I loves me my Chuck, but he needs to take some time off to re-evaluate.

Where was I? Right, Darbyshire. Like Palahniuk (along with all great satirists such as Kurt Vonnegut and J.G. Ballard), Darbyshire is frustrated with certain aspects of society, and feels the need to point out the pointlessness of our foibles. Unlike Palahniuk, however (excepting, of course, if he takes a breather and recovers his senses), Darbyshire isn't running on empty. The Warhol Gang is a vivid, bizarre, fresh, sometimes excruciatingly incisive absurdist novel that not only marks a logical progression in satire (Swift-to-Vonnugut-to-Palahniuk-to-Darbyshire?), but should serve as a rallying point for a new generation of young fans crying out for a satire to call their own.

Darbyshire's hero is Trotsky - not that Trotsky, but rather the moniker given to an aimless young man who has wandered into a job with Adsenses, a "neuromarketing company" that blueprints/brainwashes the minds of its employees in as frightening a manner as anything since A Clockwork Orange. Each employee is provided their own code name (Reagan, Thatcher, Nader, etc.) to "remove as much of [their lives] from the process as possible."

Trotsky's life is nothing but an endless parade of consumer goods, billboards, and inexpressible greed, set in an identifiable dystopia where image and actuality share a shaky truce. His job is to sit in a pod for hours on end while images of consumer products are flashed before his eyes; his brainwave response patterns are then studied:

The walls are lined with monitors. Each one shows an image of a different brain, with glowing numbers floating in the brains.

"We study everything," Nickel tells me. "We watch your heart rate, your breathing, how much you sweat. If you get an erection, we measure it." He takes me over to one of the brains. It's mostly dark, with little spots of light that flare up here and there and then fade away. The patterns of light look random.

"Is that me?" I ask.

"This is you," Nickel says, tapping the dark parts of the brain. He points to a yellow spot that glows briefly on one side of the brain. "This is you thinking about the product."

"That's good, right?" I ask.

"It's good, but its not optimal," Nickel says.

"What would be optimal," I ask.

Nickel watches another flare. "Optimal would be if that was your entire brain," he says.

Trotsky is a natural at the job, a man seemingly destined for such a life, being an almost perfect indiscriminate consumer. His overarching memory of childhood is being lost and abandoned in a mall. The mall was and is at the very centre of his being.

But very quickly, Trotsky discovers the side-effects of his job; hallucinations of the products he sees and the people he imagines using them. His manager advise him that "some people can keep it in check by buying real products." Already unhinged with a lack of actual identity, Trotsky begins living a new life through his products, finding in them a path back to reality, but after the hallucinations return, he then graduates to the next level of reality and begins looking for accident scenes to watch people die.

And then, it gets strange. Trotsky takes up with a woman named Holiday, the "Marilyn Monroe of security videos," obsessed with becoming a star through news reports and snippets of tragedies and cellphone videos broadcast on the television program Panoptical. He discovers a secret society of nihilists living beneath the mall in another mall (A subspace mall? An old Indian burial mall?) that sets itself up as a resistance, but to what is never made clear. And when Trotsky and Holiday become 'reality' stars from an inadvertent snuff film (Trotsky clad in an Andy Warhol mask), he become the de facto face of the uprising (shades of Palahniuk's space monkeys).

Part of the great frustration (and the appeal) of The Warhol Gang is that a description of the plot is practically impossible with, well, giving the entirety of the plot away. Darbyshire twists and warps reality to suit his own needs, and as Trotsky descends into a new level of madness that may or may not be real, not a page goes by without the addition of another puzzle piece to his scattered psyche. The miracle is that none of this feels forced; considering its manic narrative structure, Darbyshire keeps a firm hand on his tale, with nary a scene wasted.

As much as The Warhol Gang is anti-consumerism, it does not come across as a screed to the ignorant masses; indeed, it condemns the ignorant masses as well. When Trotsky admits confusion as to the ultimate cause the Warhol Gang is fighting for, Holiday comments "The Warhol Gang is its own cause." I'm sure I'm not the only reader who'll flashback to the numerous clashes between protesters and police at various G20 summits across the globe upon reading those words (specifically the ones the media focus on), where the point of protest appears to be anarchy for its own sake. We feel the urge to resist, but without a plan, without an visible enemy, all we can create is chaos.

The Warhol Gang is well aware of its forebearers; echoes of Ballard and Orwell and Palahniuk ring throughout, as well as (I'm sure) many others I am unfamiliar with. Such echoes are inevitable. But the story, the style, the whole of the sum of the parts; that's Darbyshire. And it is a gloriously uncomfortable, trippy trek into a world two seconds away from ours.

VERDICT: MONKEY LOVES

Prepare yourself - the official book trailer for YOU comma Idiot, by Doug Harris

In my travels, I've come across many novels I've adored, and authors I've come to love with almost fearsome passion. My latest man-crush is on Doug Harris and his upcoming novel YOU comma Idiot - and before you say it, yes, I am his publicist, what of it? Does that negate my opinion entirely? It's a great book!

Either way, I had no control over the following book trailer, which is all Doug, and all spectacular. So many trailers seem to forget that they are centered around a book, which makes for a pretty presentation, but oftentimes I actually forget there's a book to be purchased. Doug has found a way around that.

So take a look, and please post this to your own sites, if you like it. The music is by Trevor Grigg and the Infamous Few, who you should really look up.



YOU comma Idiot comes out September 17, 2010. Your world will officially change the next day.

Monkey droppings - Solar by Ian McEwan

The monkey confronts the concept of aging.

The monkey gets depressed.

The monkey confronts the concept of a grilled cheese sandwich instead.


Solar
by Ian McEwan (2010)

He belonged to that class of men - vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever - who were unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women. Or so he believed he was, and thinking seemed to make it so.And it helped that some women believed he was a genius in need of rescue.

Michael Beard is in need of rescue, but not in the way he thinks. Michael needs rescue from his own shortcomings, and quickly; the world is hurtling toward the abyss, after all.

From the reading of the jacket copy, it would appear that Solar, Ian McEwan's newest, is a comedy about the end days, where one man may hold the key to humankind's survival, but only if his redemption is forthcoming. A Terry Pratchettesque comic romp through the apocalypse, as it were.

This being a McEwan novel, however, things are rarely as they appear. The author may indeed wield a narrative device ripe with comic intent - and, truly, he succeeds in some wonderfully absurd set pieces - but Solar is in actuality a paean to aging, and a novel as pungent and blissfully thick of wit as the best of John Updike and Saul Bellow.

Michael Beard is a smart man, no question. A Nobel Prize-winning physicist for his ground-breaking Beard-Einstein Conflation, Beard, now in his fifties, has been summarily side-tracked (rather unwillingly) by the scientific demands of climate change, a study in which he has little interest or patience. Finding himself surrounded by vigorous young scientists, Beard is very much unhappy:

After outlining what he expected to read next year in the third IPCC report, Aldous told Beard - and was the fiftieth person to do so in the past twelve months - that the last ten years of the twentieth century had been the warmest ten, or was it nine, on record. Then he was musing on climate sensitivity, the temperature rise associated with a doubling of CO2 above pre-industrial levels. As they entered London proper, it was radiative forcing, and after that the familiar litany of shrinking glaciers, encroaching deserts dissolving coral reefs, disappearing this and that, on and on, while Beard sank into a gloom of inattention, not because the planet was in peril - that moronic word again -but because someone was telling him it was with such enthusiasm. This is what he disliked about political people - injustice and calamity animated them, it was their milk, their lifeblood, it pleasured them.

Worse yet, Michael's wife Patrice is cheating on him. Despite the decades of indiscretions he has had throughout four previous marriages, this table-turning leaves Michael, "not yet a refugee from the near-silent endgame of his fifth marriage," decidedly lopsided of emotion. A trip to the Arctic with a boatload of flaky artists, followed by a surreptitious accident, appear to place Beard on more solid ground, but even so, the book's only one-third over. Starting in the year 2000, and then jumping ahead to 2005 and 2009, Solar evocatively captures the steady erosion of a man to the various elements of age, society, lust, and food, even as his career threatens to bring him to prominence yet again.

Solar finds McEwan neatly interplaying the precise, befuddling world of the abstract physicist - "Quantum mechanics. What a repository, a dump, of human aspiration it was, the borderland where mathematical rigour defeated common sense, and reason and fantasy irrationally merged." - with the world of the aging Lothario, as insane and irrational a world as has ever been discovered. The qualities that make Beard a genius at his work- the irrational leaps of logic, the ability to conceive the inconceivable - are the very same qualities that make him an utter failure as a human being. Beard can make sense of the most abstract qualities of light, yet cannot possibly be bothered to figure out the reasoning behind his latest tryst. Beard is a man "self-sufficient, self-absorbed, his mind a cluster of appetites and dreamy thoughts," and McEwan takes great delight in throwing whatever possible in Beard's path to throw off his equilibrium.

Despite the intensely comedic nature of Solar's construction (has anyone ever so lovingly crafted an ode to the common potato chip?), there is an indefinable but definite core of sadness at its core, the theory that, despite moments of unadulterated genius, man is as little able to control his base impulses as he is the natural world. How can we be expected to halt imminent catastrophe when even the best and brightest of us cannot comprehend nor control the simplest of impulses that drive ourselves?

I don't believe that Solar is perfect; I found my attention wandering from time to time, as Beard's inner meanderings can be somewhat exhausting. But the writing is gloriously smart (as per usual for McEwan), and Michael Beard is a magnificently flawed creation, an amalgamation of the best and worst of man's capabilities.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES A LOT