Carl Shuker, The Method Actors: A Novel, Counterpoint, 2005.
The Method Actors is set in Japan, New York, and New Zealand. When a young military historian named Michael Edwards disappears in Tokyo, his sister Meredith comes to the city to search for him. There she meets up with old friends and acquaintances from all over the world: ex-JET exchange teachers from Canada, ex-drug addicts from Australia, drug dealers from the Netherlands, young American women with Japanese husbands hostessing for money, French kitchenhands, young Japanese mushroom growers, and wealthy young Chinese-Americans living the high life. Meredith begins to encounter increasing evidence that Michael was involved in something deeper and darker than she could have suspected: a secret history going back through Japanese war crimes in China in World War II to the quarantining of Dutch merchants on manmade islands during Japan's period of isolationism in the seventeenth century.
Kiwinovelist Shuker's debut follows a set of gaijin—young international 20-somethings who have gravitated to ultrahip, fast-forward Tokyo—as one of their number goes missing. A young Wellington-born military historian researching the Rape of Nanking, Michael Edwards suddenly disappears from his coterie, and his ex-pat clan swings into action despite their own problems. Michael's sister Meredith, 22, rushes back from a U.S. trip and must negotiate their complicated family's concern, as well as her own lack of direction. Catherine (married at 24 and having recently ended an affair with Michael), Yasuhiko (a misfit ex-botanist drug dealer to the rich and foreign), New Zealander Simon and his occasional bedmate Jacques—all get involved to one degree or another, when they can stop thinking about fashion, sex or drugs. Shuker uses short sections titled by character to shift back and forth in time, place and perspective. Meredith tirelessly roots around her brother's life, but the complex, grandiose scope of Michael's research (which may hold the key) pales in comparison to the Tokyo appearance of Catherine's husband. Shuker's dizzying debut shimmers with authentic detail, an uncanny, otherworldly sense of place and a cast of believably hardcore hipsters. - Publishers Weekly
Loner Yasu cultivates psilocybin mushrooms in his Tokyo apartment. Precocious college dropout Michael, the son of a wealthy New Zealand judge, is a rogue historian. When Michael disappears from his plush Tokyo digs, his sister, Meredith, flies in to search for him. She soon finds herself among a group of promiscuous fellow ex-pats who roam the enormous city, cell phones in hand, struggling with the language and feelings of alienation while consuming mass quantities of cigarettes, vending-machine beer, and drugs. As Meredith flounders, Yasu and his magic mushrooms dovetail with Michael's study of hidden Japanese war crimes in China during World War II. Shuker brilliantly captures Tokyo's edgy atmosphere and the cosmic loneliness of his characters in his overlong yet probing and imaginative debut novel, which possesses the frisson of Alex Garland's The Beach (1997) and a profound moral valence. How do we distinguish between the roles people play and their authentic selves? How contrived is history? How do we live with the knowledge of horrors such as the Japanese atrocities? Shuker poses daunting questions of conscience and compassion. - Donna Seaman
A mesmerizing opus by a first-time novelist worth remembering, The Method Actors trails a group of smart, stylish twentysomethings in Tokyo, where ideas of dislocation apply to the simplest comings and goings. Transplanted there from homes they'd just as soon forget, the friends wander with and around each other, sharing beds and drugs and histories, in search of a brilliant young historian who doesn't want to be found. The reason for his disappearance remains elusive, but it seems to have something to do with the work of a rogue botanist who engineers a highly potent strain of psychedelic mushrooms.
All the pieces are in place for a novel of fizzy dreams and fuzzy anxieties, which Carl Shuker delivers with an overflow of grace and ambition. Angling toward David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo in terms of style and tone, Shuker spies the internal and external worlds of characters who lose track of where one begins and the other ends. The historian develops his preoccupation with wartime atrocity into a heady consideration of the hallucinatory pull of history, which describes much of the way his friends and family go about living in the world. "Once peoples find themselves both capable and motivated in lying for a cause the concept of truth is immediately anachronism," one of the historian's interview subjects says in a cryptic film unearthed after his disappearance. It's a mystery how such a phenomenon takes hold, but it's less mysterious how the historian could go mad reconciling such a state with his utter rootlessness.
Shuker doesn't keep an especially tight hold on his ostensible themes, and his network of characters occasionally sprawls out of control, but The Method Actors nonetheless stands as a serious accomplishment. It's cerebral and probing, but also highly entertaining in the ways it surveys a city as rich for survey as Tokyo. The characters spend a lot of time mulling twentysomething dilemmas and delights in strange restaurants, commuter trains, cramped apartments, and streets that buzz with light and the noise of language. It's a rich backdrop for a novel that makes an impressive show of feeling lost and found at the same time. - Andy Battaglia
The Method Actors is a long novel -- nearly five-hundred pages --, a fact that's noteworthy because it doesn't seem to go anywhere, or at least not very far. Shuker's presentation -- not strictly chronological -- reinforces the notion, so one imagines it's on purpose, but it doesn't feel entirely right. The central event in the novel is the disappearance of Michael Edwards, which leads to his sister Meredith coming to look for him, and the counterpoint of looking for him (in the present) and uncovering the past (including what Michael was doing up to that point, and what might have led to or caused his disappearance) doesn't fully drive the novel, which bogs down instead in lengthy incidental episodes, side-stories that often are all atmosphere and don't move anything much forward.
The Method Actors is a novel of twenty-somethings in Japan, foreigners (gaijin) in a very foreign land. In generally painstaking detail Shuker describes the foreigners' lives in Tokyo, from those who come over to teach English in the JET programme to the sons and daughters of privilege -- Michael and Meredith, whose father is a New Zealand judge with a penthouse suite in the Shinjuku Prince they can use and Simon, whose entrepreneur-father charges him with dining at the finest restaurants a couple of times a week to look for cooking staff he can poach for his restaurants. Chapters focus on different characters (some of them narrating their own stories, others not), making for perhaps close to a dozen closely observed foreigner-in-Japan accounts in all. The scenes are well-related and detail-focussed, variations on a theme of often damaged people not yet sure of what they want to do with their lives trying to make their way in unreal Tokyo. Shuker could have built his whole novel around that (and at times it seems like he wants to), but he also has much grander ambitions. Specifically, there's Michael. Though a poor student it turns out he is very gifted and has, for years, been obsessed with history, writing a seminal paper on the Nanking Massacre that was published when he was still just in his teens. (In one of the few unrealistic touches Shuker has the paper reprinted in The New Republic, covering pages "20-57", but it's a magazine that rarely tops fifty pages total in length, and wouldn't print a piece of such length.) Michael's thesis is a fascinating one, and his ideas on history something that one wishes Shuker had focussed on more intently. As is, there are only tantalizing digressions or hints ( a summary of his publishing-history, for example), Shuker on the whole preferring to focus on far less interesting day-to-day lives of his many characters to make his point. History continues to play a role -- specifically, then, early Western contacts with Japan -- but this far more compelling part of the narrative is decidedly the second tier.
Michael's massacre-thesis also ties in with the book's other major preoccupation: mushrooms, specifically those with mind-altering effects. This part of the story brings in Yasu, the one prominent Japanese character, a disgraced mycologist whose promising career was ruined by a foreigner and who now grows mushrooms at home. Again Shuker wallows in detail (making for a mycologist's dream: rarely has fungus-growing been more lovingly and meticulously been described), and again he tells the story in a roundabout way, with the reasons for Yasu's disgrace, for example, only being revealed very late on.
The details are often impressive: Shuker sets neat scenes, and accurately portrays so many different aspects of the Japan-experience, but often they seem to little end. The many characters that populate the book are also distracting: it's unclear whose fate the reader should focus on. (The presentation not being entirely in chronological order also doesn't help .....) Michael, though he figures in quite a few of the scenes from the past, remains a shadowy presence -- and his prodigy-status also isn't entirely convincing (though the idea of a history-prodigy is intriguing).
Packed with ideas, and attempting to connect history, hallucination, contemporary alienation, and much more, The Method Actors is enormously ambitious, but also unsatisfying. Shuker convinces in his details, especially of twentysomething foreigners in Tokyo, but also regarding his mushroom and historical forays, but the larger picture remains blurred. Early on Michael is quoted:
"We were method actors," he says. "To know you gotta feel. To feel you gotta do. What if you could wake up imaginations, Cathy ? That's what I ask myself, every -morning-I-wake-up."
But it doesn't come across as entirely convincing, not enough of Michael revealed to explain what he's after.
A very odd book, with a good deal of promise and many let-downs. - The Complete Review
“A tremendous stylist and a tremendous observer. . . . again and again I stopped to admire particular sentences and paragraphs.” —STEPHEN DOBYNS, THE CHURCH OF DEAD GIRLS
“I admire Shuker’s bravura attentiveness to the little things as much as I do his shameless and bracing bid for a Pynchonesque grand slam.” —GEOFFREY WOLFF, DUKE OF DECEPTION
“It’s difficult to convey here the thrill of Shuker’s writing, with its up-to-the-minute feel, its endless audacity … with its defiant difficulty, sly ambition and writing more than sharp enough to live up to its own hype.” —SAM FINNEMORE, THE LISTENER
Shuker’s novel immediately garnered comparisons to David Foster Wallace and David Mitchell when it was published in New Zealand. The voices and set pieces are dazzling. For me they call to mind the great Henry Green’s books full of characters in medias res, leaving the reader to sort out who is who and what is really going on. Shuker’s other books are also all highly recommended. - Matt Bucher
CHINUA ACHEBE'S challenge to Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" -- asking whether a novel that "depersonalizes a portion of the human race can be called a great work of art" -- is a particularly powerful example of a basic literary question. Can fiction that falsifies the nature of our reality have a meaningful artistic existence? From stream-of-consciousness monologues to noir thrillers, the work of innovative writers ("inventors," in Ezra Pound's formulation) brings back a fresh depiction of the world. But with their commercial cynicism or self-conscious style, failed novelists ("diluters," according to Pound) manage only to distort.
This is the issue at stake in Carl Shuker's first novel, an ensemble piece that jumps back and forth in time, point of view and tense, swimming deeply into its characters' consciousness, then out into cultural critique. Brash and fearless, "The Method Actors" is a self-consciously postmodern challenge to our perceived reality and its fictional depiction. But the question on which the book's success hinges is much older and simpler: does the formal ingenuity of its composition provide new insight or is it just an exercise in literary technique?
Shuker's basic plot concerns the disappearance from modern-day Tokyo of Michael Edwards, a young historian specializing in war crimes, and his sister's attempts to find him. Other story lines present other characters tangentially involved in that search: Yasu, a cultivator of magic mushrooms (apparently the drug of choice for East Asia's Generation X); Simon, the son of an international restaurateur; Catherine, Michael's abandoned lover, whom we know almost exclusively through successive drafts of a paper she's writing on Shakespeare. Various friends, lovers and acquaintances of these characters also wander into the action, exposing us to their perceptions and memories as the complex, multilayered reality of the book unfolds. "I lived in Tokyo for eight months," Simon tells us. "It moved quickly, and now there is a disassociated quality to it all, like a dream in which I can't remember myself as a character, like a movie with no sound. I tried, soon after I returned, just once, to explain the feeling to someone back in L.A. . . . It's like, everything you learn outside Tokyo is useless in Tokyo. Everything you learn in Tokyo is useless outside Tokyo."
With the exception of Yasu, the characters are young foreigners, prodigiously precocious in their tastes and appetites, navigating the opportunities for mind-altering adventure in a city -- "America's deformed little cyberbaby," one character calls it -- so complex and contradictory that exploring it can be a full-time occupation. Or so it seems to them. Doubtless they'd like to be known as expatriates, but they read more convincingly as senior-year-abroad tourists, afflicted with adolescent anomie: "The usual trajectory is they come to Tokyo looking for other selves, and only later do they begin to look for other people, whom they'll somehow magically find those other selves within."
At his best, however, Shuker is less investigative than descriptive. He lets his eye wander over anything -- a naked body, the anonymous expanses of an airport -- with equal patience and attention to detail. Virtually every one of his book's 500 pages has something worth lingering over, but many of the best passages are reserved for the cityscapes, which have an intensity reminiscent of William Gibson's visions of the gritty cybernetic future:
"Opposite, on the Tsutaya building, a TV four or five stories high is playing a Microsoft advertisement and in the dimming twilight the TV is lighting up the faces of the crowds in flickers, shining on a thousand heads of black hair. The air is thick and hot, radiating up from the concrete, and the traffic is roaring and the advertisement has changed to a video for the new Hitomi single and while I have been waiting here . . . I have seen a homeless man dragged past me by two uniformed Tobu department store staff to the police koban, protesting mildly, flapping his hands, some fluid leaking out of his pants, leaving a trail of wet on the concrete all the way back to Tobu, but it's so hot and there are so many people the fluid has already mostly evaporated or been tramped inside Shibuya station."
ALL this stylistic intricacy is certainly appealing, but is it more than merely ingenious? Michael's obsession with war crimes is presumably meant as a moral anchor for this fictional universe. But Michael -- perhaps internalizing the fractured nature of the narrative -- is unable to arrive at any durable historical or moral insight, which may be the reason for his disappearance. "If you're not confused," he says at one point, "you're not trying hard enough." Well, maybe. Here he sounds more like a grad student at a lecture on Derrida than a genuinely engaged historian.
A novel can explain a philosophical argument or it can dramatize it. In other words, a novel can make you think about something or make you experience it. (And sometimes, on rare occasions, it can do both.) Shuker's actors may not have completely mastered the Method: for much of the novel, they make you think but not feel. Despite its fascinations, this ambitious, often brilliant novel told me too much about itself and too little about the reality we all struggle to understand. - Neil Gordon
Carl Shuker, Three Novellas for a Novel, Mansfield Road Press, 2011. threenovellasforanovel.com
Three Novellas for a Novel, based on the shocking true story of Tokyo's Super Free, is three intertwined 21st century horror stories set in a Japan riddled with concrete cancer. From the author of the Prize in Modern Letters-winning The Method Actors and the cult classic The Lazy Boys, with a new foreword.
“A thrilling ride … defiant difficulty, sly ambition and writing more than sharp enough to live up to its own hype … a rare pleasure for fans of truly innovative fiction." - The Listener
"Something like a modern classic. I tread carefully over the word masterpiece; still it's what I felt when I read it." - CS Leigh
Ah, experimental writing; the bane of any book reviewer's existence! Because as I've said here before, in many ways experimental books are virtually critic-proof, in that they are expressly designed to alienate and confuse a good half of the audience right from the start, and having a book reviewer point that out amounts to not much more than critical masturbation. That's the definition of experimental, after all, is that the artist is trying something that's never been done before; and as a result, that artist is going into that project not knowing in any way what the audience reaction is going to be, with it maybe finding a surprisingly large amount of sympathetic ears but most likely finding almost none at all. The reasons that experimental artists create such projects, then -- to express a startlingly unique vision, to innovate for the sake of innovation, to shake up the staid world of traditional rules and customs -- also tend to be critic-proof when all is said and done, making it very difficult indeed for a book reviewer like me to provide a decent critical analysis for such projects, or to give an overall general opinion of whether or not it's worth your time.
Take, for example, New Zealander Carl Shuker's online literary experiment Three Novellas for a Novel, a Radiohead-style "pay what you want" series of electronic novellas that are being
self-released at his website even as we speak, which was enthusiastically recommended to me by American author Michael FitzGerald (who I've also reviewed here in the past). Because let's just be as honest as we can -- it took me six damn reads of novella one before I could even begin to understand what was going on, and very quickly into novella two I realized that things were only going to get worse, leading me to simply giving up for good. But yet I curiously loved this project nonetheless, a dense and trippy and highly atmospheric fever-dream of a tale, told in the style of a David Lynch movie or perhaps a David Mitchell book, a story you don't read so much as you ingest. Plus, I know beforehand that I'm not the ideal target for this book anyway; these shared-theme novellas, adding up to a mid-sized unified novel by the end (hence its title), are in fact designed for the top one-percent of most intelligent, most educated, most erudite readers out there, those who are fatally bored with almost every single other book on the market and are looking for something especially juicy and challenging to sink their teeth into. If you're one of these people, you're going to freaking love Three Novellas for a Novel; if you're not, you're going to likely wonder who this Shuker fellow thinks he is, calling this readable literature in the first place. Yeah, welcome to experimental writing!
Now, for sure Shuker comes with a pedigree, part of the reason that I stuck in there as long as I did with this manuscript; holder of a Master's from Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters, his first novel The Method Actors was the winner of the Prize In Modern Letters, the world's most lucrative literary award for a first-time author, leading to this newest project having a lot more advance credibility than the usual self-published online experimental pay-what-you-want manuscript. And indeed, anyone who's a fan of extremely dense science-fiction is sure to love at least the first novella in this cycle, the depleted forest; it concerns a Caucasian expat named James Ballard, living in a near-future Tokyo and working a bizarre corporate media job, in a slightly alternate universe from ours that has seen the development of what's called "concrete cancer" -- that is, over the last decade, for some inexplicable reason, concrete buildings will suddenly just lose their entire integrity, with the concrete itself literally falling apart during a strong wind into trillions of sand pebbles, leaving massive devastation in its wake.
Like the best of contemporary science-fiction authors, then, this gives Shuker an excuse to paint some jarringly original mental portraits of this dystopian Tokyo; an entire district of all-wood skyscrapers, highways made out of bolted-down sheets of Plexiglas, abandoned '60s-style Mod resorts overlooking Mount Fuji, with walls that crumble like ash when touched. And in fact, when it comes to all this stuff, Shuker is simply brilliant at both story and detail, with the depleted forest easily able to hold its own against such similarly dense near-future authors as Charles Stross and Jeff Vandermeer, and to tell you the truth I'm interested now in visiting his earlier novels and seeing if they are indeed more traditional "New Weird" tales. Ah, but then we get into novella two, which in usual experimental style I can't even list correctly here for you using ASCII text alone; spelled out, it's called delta omicron hills park, but now substitute the Greek symbols for the letters mentioned at the beginning of its title. Whew! And see, just the story itself takes some explaining as well; it is ostensibly the shocking tell-all memoir of a minor member of a "Super Free" type group, a wealthy and privileged Asian teen who was recently busted organizing giant thousand-person forced-drinking gang-rape orgy parties in warehouses around the country for fellow wealthy privileged Asian teens. But see, what we're reading is the English translation, which was deliberately done with a piece of software that deliberately doesn't work very well; this Westernized version, then, is being sold to the British and American markets as a postmodern comedy, a "statement" on the frustrations of language in a Web 2.0 world.
In effect, it makes the entire novella unreadable, or at least as far as I could tell, a hundred pages of random words that have been strung in a row by some piece of automated software, which certainly proved Shuker's point but unfortunately made me in particular just give up on the entire rest of the project, not even bothering to read novella three (which by the way is called beau mot plage and will be coming out later this month). But then, this is where I begin to doubt myself as a reviewer, which is why experimental writing is so tricky to review; because maybe there is a real story being told in DO hills park, that maybe that random text isn't so random after all, and that I'm simply not smart enough to pick up on it myself. That's certainly what this novella's fans will say after reading this review -- "Ah, Pettus, you don't know what the f-ck you're talking about! This novel is perfectly understandable, and I can't believe you're too dumb to get this!" And this of course is what I mean when I say that such books are "critic-proof;" that since they are deliberately designed to be either intensely liked or intensely disliked, intensely understood or intensely not, you as the reader can't necessarily trust the opinion of anyone else at all, with you basically having to read the book for yourself to determine even the most general sense of whether or not it's any good. That when it comes to such books, my opinion as a critic is virtually worthless, making my role as a reviewer virtually pointless.
As a simple reader, though, I happen to love experimental projects; so today, I guess, don't think of me so much as a critic than as a simple fan, bringing your attention to a cool yet frustrating project that would normally otherwise probably not come to your attention. This is the perfect kind of experimental book for you to take a chance on, precisely because it's completely free if you want it to be (and seriously, you slacker, what else do you need?); it's something I highly recommend that you go and check out for yourself. - www.cclapcenter.com/2008/06/book_review_three_novellas_for.html
Carl Shuker, Lazy Boys, Counterpoint, 2006.
Carl Shuker's protagonist, Richard Sauer, heads off to college for no reason other than to escape the stultifying normalcy of his middle-class family in Timaru, New Zealand. He may appear ordinary in his aimlessness, mangling his way through his first year in college, but his bonging and banging, his anger and rage, take a brutal turn at an out-of-control dorm party which lands Richey in front of the disciplinary committee with a sexual harassment charge. Dropping out of school before he's thrown out, Richey and his housemates Matt, Nick, and Ursula begin a freefall that forces Richey to face his most destructive desires.
Sex, violence, mutilation, and drugs fuel the despair and alienation of these disaffected youth — those once innocent but now struggle to find the right combination of alcohol and drugs to keep an all-night buzz. Like a punch in the stomach or a sustained cry, Carl Shuker's risky and harrowing first person narrative is as visceral as Fight Club and as brutal as A Clockwork Orange. On the surface Richey's actions are unforgivable, but his unformed and distorted world is immediate and recognizable to a generation brought up in a society indifferent to its own nihilism.
A novel that begins with epigrams from the Pixies, the Clash and Milton has good potential. Don’t let it fool you.
After a promising debut with The Method Actors (2005), a layered portrait of expats in Japan, Shuker takes an odd step backward, time-wise and otherwise, into the demimonde of collegiate underachievers on New Zealand’s South Island. It’s the aoristic modern age, and 18-year-old Richard Sauer, aka Souse, is a mess who thrives on video nasties, ganja, piss (that is, beer) and piss bongs. “Students are allowed, expected, even obliged to keep up the image—carry out new feats of bonging, drink the most, the quickest, for the longest duration.” He has spent most of his grants and student allowances but has yet to attend a class, and, as the cancer-stricken angel who, one supposes, stands for all that is good—his opposite, that is—reminds him, it’s April. Oh, yes, young master Sauer is possibly suicidal and certainly violent: Early on, he beats his parents’ little dog, while even earlier on, he rapes a young woman. Given this résumé, it seems that his options are limited: He can join the army or the police, become a mechanic, go to tech school or stay at home “going insane on the dole.” He does quite worse than all that. His parents aren’t much help in Souse’s decline and fall, though they try to be; think of Alex’s mum and pop in A Clockwork Orange, and you’re most of the way there. Souse is just as bad a piece of work. Shuker writes well, and the stream-of-consciousness weirdness coming out of Souse has moments. But the point of the exercise seems to be unclear, unless it’s to report the dreariness of life in the postindustrial Antipodes or warn of what listening to one too many Cure songs can lead to.
Absent clear guidance, take these lessons: Stay clear of beer bongs. And of this book, too.- Kirkus Reviews
WHERE would we be without sheep? It is fascinating to follow their tracks through our literature; from the lost sheep in Janet Frame’s The Day of the Sheep to the newly shorn sheep of Joanna Paul’s Imogen, their presence is iconic. In Carl Shuker’s second novel The Lazy Boys, started before his prize winning The Method Actors, the iconic sheep is a dead one.
Richard Sauer, the novel’s eighteen year old narrator has his own way of seeing things. Once he saw a drowned sheep trapped underwater. The sheep was creating a ripple in the dark still water- well, not the sheep but an eel animating it as it fed, working its way from the inside out. In his imagination a younger Richey compounds this image with a story his companions tell of how they stoned a sheep, till it jumped off a cliff to its death (its ok, the sheep was old). The two sheep become confounded, a killed one, in a vision of death in life, of a violence that riddles his story. Disturbed and disturbing.
Where did it all start? In the hard lessons his father taught him? “Don’t get smart with me boy... I’ll put you in the bloody hospital.” In the culture of bullying at Timaru Boy’s High? How will the boy become a man? A Southern man at that? A tender hearted boy? Richey rejects the sweet boy that his friend Anna reminds him of. Perhaps she is his only friend. She is dying anyway. He filters out the saving memories of his childhood, of times spent by the placid Lake Alexandrina. He dismisses his mother.
No shame. That’s the story. That’s the attitude you need to be accepted by your mates. You have to be hard – no shame is the fend when you’re not sure of yourself. Whatever you do, however things turn to shit, the thing is not to show any anxiety, any feelings at all. If you do, you’ll be branded a fag. If you’re labelled a fag, you may as well kill yourself. The trick is not to be noticed. In this world boys learn to say yes because if they say no, they might start questioning you and yeah.
The anti hero of this novel doesn’t play rugby, or any sport. So he’s on the backfoot. But then he discovers that getting wasted and spewing on the sofa is a start towards acceptance and manhood. Serious drinking is his lifeline. And bullying the sideline (If you’re not for us, you’re against us). The trouble is, if you’re not mainstream (who is) it’s hard to tell when you’ve passed the test. You take respect however you get it. Richard Sauer’s rite of passage leaves a trail of havoc. Rugby is the game of this novel; his fall is like a scrum folding. Collapsed or twisted. Is it something that happens or is it self inflicted, Richey wonders. To the reader it seems both, and equally.
If you are leaving school and can’t think of what to do, why not enrol at Varsity (in this case Otago). Get away from the folks, from the claustrophobia of half a city like Timaru. Get a student loan, a lump sum. Get on the piss, do drugs, score a few chicks. Boys will be boys, after all – isn’t this just a stage? Not in this story. This isn’t the rollicking world of Baxter’s Ode to Mixed Flatting. Not a picaresque genre piece like Scarfies. It is a provocative satire, a horror story. It turns squalid and deep, taking the reader into territory that some will recoil from. I suppose it could have been set anywhere-say Hawera, or Brighton. But Shuker knows his Dunedin – cold and dark, dramatically provincial. What a hell of a place to escape to. Talk about isolation. Good for nihilists and sectarians (I love to visit – some of my best friends hail from there).
Over his flat Strangeways looms a deserted castle. It’s at the door of this castle that Richey hammers at the end. No one answers. The Maquis de Sade has been dead a long time. The denouement veers away from life, towards Mishima perhaps.
The Deep South has always been a good setting for the culture of unease; Shuker outdoes his predecessors in the literary virtuosity with which he calls up the familiar demons from the abyss, the abyss whose rim the crowd stumbles along rowdily. Listen to the thoughts, the idiolect of the peer group. Its conformism, its nicknames, its abusiveness, its banality, its brutality, its misogyny, its homophobia. In a word, ugly. And yet for some it’s one big party. A big night that you can’t pike out of.
Fear and loathing in Dundas Street. Don’t drug-induced rampages become boring? Souse’s fall becomes more and more of a stagger. We know he is going to succumb to his demons, but he takes his time. At times it drags, this self-obliteration; Richey gets bored, it takes more and more to get him going. At others, the acuity of his observations skewers attention. There’s a calm about Richey, when he’s not jittery. His observations are beautifully rendered, whether lyrical, dramatic or phantasmagoric. Returning home for a breather “Timaru is silent and gray, a smell like watery tinned salmon drifting up from the harbour.” At an aftermatch function in a motel he notes the youth of the girls on the white couches “sipping beer from plastic Speight’s 500ml cups and some of them look nervous and almost all of them have collars that are standing straight up.”(Lion Breweries may not find all the product placement a positive). Inside a bus in a line of traffic in a snowstorm on the Kilmog “I can only see my own reflection in the window, half-darkened, fluttering and flickering, tentative and ghostlike in the flakes of snow closest to the side of the bus.” It’s not all random:The lighting may be sporadic, but Richey seems to be going somewhere.
On another level the novel is naturalistic, clinical. Given his upbringing, this is what will happen. The expert Dr Johanssen spells it out for Richey in her Book of Murder. How violence is socially learnt. How Richey has lost his self. Where depression and anger will lead him to. What will release him from his paralysis. In a society where violence is socially acceptable. Inertia builds through endless rounds of chaos. In the end he has no choice. He has no identity, he is possessed. The shock of the climax seems a setup, prefigured as it is by his violent opening gambit. The logic is exact.
“Ta go. Who ta go”. Don’t we find the painted tribe picturesque? Hasn’t rugby cleaned up its act? The Lazy Boys brings it back into disrepute. Rugby is never going to be the beautiful game. Here’s Matt, the pizza dough maker, an artist, a sort of friend to Richey. At a clash with the Boks at Carisbrook, the crowd hooliganism gets too much. What he can’t take is the cop-out, the laziness of the spectators who can’t think of anything better to do. “So long as you’re a hard cunt and you hammer another guy, people like you and respect you, right.” Matt sees it as a failure of imagination.
Richey is not allowed to sit in his father’s Lazyboy, but he does anyway. He doesn’t only sit, he masturbates over pornos, volume right down, while his parents sleep overhead.
The after match functions are horrific, even for Richie. He gains admission through mistaken identity, and shows his outsider status in his jitters. Hilariously and disastrously, he tries to confide his malaise to Marc Ellis. This is almost the nadir of his not being understood. Until I got to this section, I was dubious about a dare a friend of mine said he witnessed in a Dunedin bar involving another notable rugby player and a coprographic act. In The Lazy Boys the surreal can be so convincing. The burning sofa on the terraces was another standout performance. The only scene with Maori: Hell’s Angels.
Apart from reading this for the hell of it, is there a lesson in Shuker’s version of the Fall? Even if he doesn’t intend it? A companion to Celia Lashlie? Could a reading of him tell us more about where our boys are going wrong, or at least serve as a warning? Give us second thoughts about sending our kids to Who ta go? It wasn’t as bad as that in our day, was it?
Recently I ran into some Old Boys. Not one of them a Richey – all success stories. When they’d had quite a few, out came the other stories. They reminded me of Ancient Mariners but with a glazed eye rather than a glittering one-not over the gutter yet. It wasn’t pretty. It was obviously the time of their lives. Mate. - Charles Bisley
Carl Shuker has observed that The Lazy Boys, his second novel, after The Method Actors, winner of the 2006 Prize in Modern Letters, tends to be reviewed quite differently inside New Zealand than outside. The Lazy Boys focuses on the psychic disintegration of Richey “Souse” Sauer, nominally a college student a prodigious drinker and adherent to an especially bleak vision of masculinity embodied in the slogan, “No shame.” The novel opens with Souse’s committing of a drunken sexual assault or harassment that he can’t remember, and it culminates in a particularly gruesome attack. New Zealand reviewers recognize the book as a species of densely realized provincial novel, an attempt to depict accurately a nihilism specific to college-age males in southern New Zealand in the early 1990s. North American reviewers, however, tend to view the book as either glorifying or wallowing in that nihilism, reading it as a kind of Less Than Zero for the college set.
Shuker ought to be absolved of this charge, however. Whatever grasp of local detail The Lazy Boys might possess, it also points up an uncanny ambiguity in the language of Souse and his friends, one that can’t be reduced to “glorification.” On the one hand, Shuker captures the testosterone-driven verve of adolescent slang, and shows why this might be appealing to young men worried about their social standing. But he also makes clear how the limited vocabulary of these young men both embodies their emotional limitations and shields them from recognizing it. The novel opens with a five-page overture in which Souse presents his account of the epic drinking that preceded his unremembered assault. Souse and his friends start doing beer bongs in a toilet, and so the word piss comes screaming to the fore: “There’s like piss all over the floor, piss on the walls, piss all over us and the floor’s slippery as and this big like piss and water fight ends up starting”; “I was really pissed too, as well as the floor being real slippery”. But then he accidentally sticks his hand “into this fucking gross blocked up urinal, all people’s piss and those soaps and beer and cigarette butts and ash and shit”. By the bottom of the page, he’s pissed in another sense, too, as his anger and embarrassment about the accident in the toilet lead him to lash out at a woman. What Souse can’t see is that if the excremental casualness of his language braces him against an indifferent world, it also hardens him against his own best impulses, preventing him from experiencing any non-pathological happiness. By the novel’s end, he’ll admit to being “frightened of himself”, but it’s far from clear whether he’s frightened of his rage or his softness.
Shuker’s key insight into Souse’s character is the mantra, “no shame.” It means, “my actions are typical. It says, any offence you feel at my actions is a function of your own naivety; this is how things are done. It says, this is what is reasonable; this is what is acceptable”. While Souse admits the phrase is defensive, he’s necessarily blind to its corrosive effects. Souse likes the phrase’s economy: I do what I do, this is what guys do, accept it or fuck off—all these are encompassed in “no shame.” More, it gives him a clear path of action in any given scenario: Do whatever a friend asks. If something bad happens, then, no shame because it happened in the context of what guys do.
Souse misses the fact that embracing the phrase turns him into a kind of automaton. He almost gets it, but not quite. So, for example, he says early on that his violence “extends directly from my experience, this country, my life ... And when I say ‘I,’ it doesn’t matter, believe me, because there are many others like me”. And he’s fascinated with psychiatric treatises on serial killers and murder-rapists, spending hours in his bedroom collating the circumstances of his life against those of famous psychopaths. What Shuker makes clear is that this apparently sociological argument is in fact just a narcissistic update of “no shame.” Souse’s fear—of himself, of being shown up, of being weak—drives him to pathologize his own actions. It’s as if the horrors he commits accrue, not to himself, but to society. When a young woman near the end of the novel points out that “no shame” is “warped ... It’s not an affirmation. It’s a pity,” it detonates explosively. All he do is beg silently “Don’t you dare” and curse aloud “Fuck ... you”. What’s striking here is that he is someone who doesn’t dare; he acts to avoid daring, because to dare means potential failure. While Shuker presents Souse’s point of view “with conviction”, it’s clear that he doesn’t endorse it.
In the main, Shuker excels at confining himself to Souse’s point of view, and to allowing his insights about the self-destructive posing of adolescent masculinity to emerge obliquely through Souse’s darkening language. Occasionally, though, he can’t let a line or an image get away, and his protagonist says things that sound unlikely. After the novel’s opening party, Souse retreats to his parents house, and, while they’re away, tortures the dog, masturbates on his father’s chair until he bleeds, wets his bed, and fires a gun through the family television. But he also is able to notice that “Dad’s got his weight on one foot and his hips cocked casually; his body forms the shape of a parenthesis behind and beyond Mum who stands, shoulders squared to me, her focus completely on me, with that almost smug air of certainty, of someone who knows their back is covered”. Even the way the alliteration develops throughout this sentence makes it seem unlikely to have emanated from Souse’s consciousness.
And then there’s Anna, almost the only person besides his parents who still calls Souse “Richey.” Anna haunts the novel: We find out in an epigraph that she has died, killing herself after the return of cancer. Throughout the novel, we read letters from her to Souse that remember a time when Souse’s affective palette was less monochrome, and he spends a considerable amount of psychic energy denying that these emotions and this psychological flexibility are still available to him. Finally, he ends up thinking, “Forgiveness is temporary and time is short and she is dead”. Souse does speak in a compressed tone, but the economy and rhythm of this sentence sound too sophisticated for him.
Beyond its evident interest in the desperate self-alienation that is one response to male adolescent crisis, The Lazy Boys does offer a recognizable, if bleak, portrait of college life, especially in its attachment to music. Kurt Cobain’s death is probably the most significant world event in the novel, and almost the only moment of connection happens when somebody discovers a copy of “The Draize Train”. Souse and his friends are in college at time when New Zealand has just defunded higher education, shifting to a so-called “user-pays” system. The ramifications of this approach, including the way it re-introduces certain kinds of class anxieties at strange moments, are everywhere in the novel, though that would probably be clearer to a New Zealand readership. The Lazy Boys deserves a wide readership, especially among those interested in young people and the way they can, as Freud said of neurotics, “escape into illness.” - Jason B. Jones
Carl Shuker, Anti Lebanon: A Novel, Counterpoint, 2013.Carl Shuker, Three Novellas for a Novel, Mansfield Road Press, 2011. threenovellasforanovel.com
Three Novellas for a Novel, based on the shocking true story of Tokyo's Super Free, is three intertwined 21st century horror stories set in a Japan riddled with concrete cancer. From the author of the Prize in Modern Letters-winning The Method Actors and the cult classic The Lazy Boys, with a new foreword.
“A thrilling ride … defiant difficulty, sly ambition and writing more than sharp enough to live up to its own hype … a rare pleasure for fans of truly innovative fiction." - The Listener
"Something like a modern classic. I tread carefully over the word masterpiece; still it's what I felt when I read it." - CS Leigh
Ah, experimental writing; the bane of any book reviewer's existence! Because as I've said here before, in many ways experimental books are virtually critic-proof, in that they are expressly designed to alienate and confuse a good half of the audience right from the start, and having a book reviewer point that out amounts to not much more than critical masturbation. That's the definition of experimental, after all, is that the artist is trying something that's never been done before; and as a result, that artist is going into that project not knowing in any way what the audience reaction is going to be, with it maybe finding a surprisingly large amount of sympathetic ears but most likely finding almost none at all. The reasons that experimental artists create such projects, then -- to express a startlingly unique vision, to innovate for the sake of innovation, to shake up the staid world of traditional rules and customs -- also tend to be critic-proof when all is said and done, making it very difficult indeed for a book reviewer like me to provide a decent critical analysis for such projects, or to give an overall general opinion of whether or not it's worth your time.
Take, for example, New Zealander Carl Shuker's online literary experiment Three Novellas for a Novel, a Radiohead-style "pay what you want" series of electronic novellas that are being
self-released at his website even as we speak, which was enthusiastically recommended to me by American author Michael FitzGerald (who I've also reviewed here in the past). Because let's just be as honest as we can -- it took me six damn reads of novella one before I could even begin to understand what was going on, and very quickly into novella two I realized that things were only going to get worse, leading me to simply giving up for good. But yet I curiously loved this project nonetheless, a dense and trippy and highly atmospheric fever-dream of a tale, told in the style of a David Lynch movie or perhaps a David Mitchell book, a story you don't read so much as you ingest. Plus, I know beforehand that I'm not the ideal target for this book anyway; these shared-theme novellas, adding up to a mid-sized unified novel by the end (hence its title), are in fact designed for the top one-percent of most intelligent, most educated, most erudite readers out there, those who are fatally bored with almost every single other book on the market and are looking for something especially juicy and challenging to sink their teeth into. If you're one of these people, you're going to freaking love Three Novellas for a Novel; if you're not, you're going to likely wonder who this Shuker fellow thinks he is, calling this readable literature in the first place. Yeah, welcome to experimental writing!
Now, for sure Shuker comes with a pedigree, part of the reason that I stuck in there as long as I did with this manuscript; holder of a Master's from Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters, his first novel The Method Actors was the winner of the Prize In Modern Letters, the world's most lucrative literary award for a first-time author, leading to this newest project having a lot more advance credibility than the usual self-published online experimental pay-what-you-want manuscript. And indeed, anyone who's a fan of extremely dense science-fiction is sure to love at least the first novella in this cycle, the depleted forest; it concerns a Caucasian expat named James Ballard, living in a near-future Tokyo and working a bizarre corporate media job, in a slightly alternate universe from ours that has seen the development of what's called "concrete cancer" -- that is, over the last decade, for some inexplicable reason, concrete buildings will suddenly just lose their entire integrity, with the concrete itself literally falling apart during a strong wind into trillions of sand pebbles, leaving massive devastation in its wake.
Like the best of contemporary science-fiction authors, then, this gives Shuker an excuse to paint some jarringly original mental portraits of this dystopian Tokyo; an entire district of all-wood skyscrapers, highways made out of bolted-down sheets of Plexiglas, abandoned '60s-style Mod resorts overlooking Mount Fuji, with walls that crumble like ash when touched. And in fact, when it comes to all this stuff, Shuker is simply brilliant at both story and detail, with the depleted forest easily able to hold its own against such similarly dense near-future authors as Charles Stross and Jeff Vandermeer, and to tell you the truth I'm interested now in visiting his earlier novels and seeing if they are indeed more traditional "New Weird" tales. Ah, but then we get into novella two, which in usual experimental style I can't even list correctly here for you using ASCII text alone; spelled out, it's called delta omicron hills park, but now substitute the Greek symbols for the letters mentioned at the beginning of its title. Whew! And see, just the story itself takes some explaining as well; it is ostensibly the shocking tell-all memoir of a minor member of a "Super Free" type group, a wealthy and privileged Asian teen who was recently busted organizing giant thousand-person forced-drinking gang-rape orgy parties in warehouses around the country for fellow wealthy privileged Asian teens. But see, what we're reading is the English translation, which was deliberately done with a piece of software that deliberately doesn't work very well; this Westernized version, then, is being sold to the British and American markets as a postmodern comedy, a "statement" on the frustrations of language in a Web 2.0 world.
In effect, it makes the entire novella unreadable, or at least as far as I could tell, a hundred pages of random words that have been strung in a row by some piece of automated software, which certainly proved Shuker's point but unfortunately made me in particular just give up on the entire rest of the project, not even bothering to read novella three (which by the way is called beau mot plage and will be coming out later this month). But then, this is where I begin to doubt myself as a reviewer, which is why experimental writing is so tricky to review; because maybe there is a real story being told in DO hills park, that maybe that random text isn't so random after all, and that I'm simply not smart enough to pick up on it myself. That's certainly what this novella's fans will say after reading this review -- "Ah, Pettus, you don't know what the f-ck you're talking about! This novel is perfectly understandable, and I can't believe you're too dumb to get this!" And this of course is what I mean when I say that such books are "critic-proof;" that since they are deliberately designed to be either intensely liked or intensely disliked, intensely understood or intensely not, you as the reader can't necessarily trust the opinion of anyone else at all, with you basically having to read the book for yourself to determine even the most general sense of whether or not it's any good. That when it comes to such books, my opinion as a critic is virtually worthless, making my role as a reviewer virtually pointless.
As a simple reader, though, I happen to love experimental projects; so today, I guess, don't think of me so much as a critic than as a simple fan, bringing your attention to a cool yet frustrating project that would normally otherwise probably not come to your attention. This is the perfect kind of experimental book for you to take a chance on, precisely because it's completely free if you want it to be (and seriously, you slacker, what else do you need?); it's something I highly recommend that you go and check out for yourself. - www.cclapcenter.com/2008/06/book_review_three_novellas_for.html
Carl Shuker, Lazy Boys, Counterpoint, 2006.
Carl Shuker's protagonist, Richard Sauer, heads off to college for no reason other than to escape the stultifying normalcy of his middle-class family in Timaru, New Zealand. He may appear ordinary in his aimlessness, mangling his way through his first year in college, but his bonging and banging, his anger and rage, take a brutal turn at an out-of-control dorm party which lands Richey in front of the disciplinary committee with a sexual harassment charge. Dropping out of school before he's thrown out, Richey and his housemates Matt, Nick, and Ursula begin a freefall that forces Richey to face his most destructive desires.
Sex, violence, mutilation, and drugs fuel the despair and alienation of these disaffected youth — those once innocent but now struggle to find the right combination of alcohol and drugs to keep an all-night buzz. Like a punch in the stomach or a sustained cry, Carl Shuker's risky and harrowing first person narrative is as visceral as Fight Club and as brutal as A Clockwork Orange. On the surface Richey's actions are unforgivable, but his unformed and distorted world is immediate and recognizable to a generation brought up in a society indifferent to its own nihilism.
A novel that begins with epigrams from the Pixies, the Clash and Milton has good potential. Don’t let it fool you.
After a promising debut with The Method Actors (2005), a layered portrait of expats in Japan, Shuker takes an odd step backward, time-wise and otherwise, into the demimonde of collegiate underachievers on New Zealand’s South Island. It’s the aoristic modern age, and 18-year-old Richard Sauer, aka Souse, is a mess who thrives on video nasties, ganja, piss (that is, beer) and piss bongs. “Students are allowed, expected, even obliged to keep up the image—carry out new feats of bonging, drink the most, the quickest, for the longest duration.” He has spent most of his grants and student allowances but has yet to attend a class, and, as the cancer-stricken angel who, one supposes, stands for all that is good—his opposite, that is—reminds him, it’s April. Oh, yes, young master Sauer is possibly suicidal and certainly violent: Early on, he beats his parents’ little dog, while even earlier on, he rapes a young woman. Given this résumé, it seems that his options are limited: He can join the army or the police, become a mechanic, go to tech school or stay at home “going insane on the dole.” He does quite worse than all that. His parents aren’t much help in Souse’s decline and fall, though they try to be; think of Alex’s mum and pop in A Clockwork Orange, and you’re most of the way there. Souse is just as bad a piece of work. Shuker writes well, and the stream-of-consciousness weirdness coming out of Souse has moments. But the point of the exercise seems to be unclear, unless it’s to report the dreariness of life in the postindustrial Antipodes or warn of what listening to one too many Cure songs can lead to.
Absent clear guidance, take these lessons: Stay clear of beer bongs. And of this book, too.- Kirkus Reviews
WHERE would we be without sheep? It is fascinating to follow their tracks through our literature; from the lost sheep in Janet Frame’s The Day of the Sheep to the newly shorn sheep of Joanna Paul’s Imogen, their presence is iconic. In Carl Shuker’s second novel The Lazy Boys, started before his prize winning The Method Actors, the iconic sheep is a dead one.
Richard Sauer, the novel’s eighteen year old narrator has his own way of seeing things. Once he saw a drowned sheep trapped underwater. The sheep was creating a ripple in the dark still water- well, not the sheep but an eel animating it as it fed, working its way from the inside out. In his imagination a younger Richey compounds this image with a story his companions tell of how they stoned a sheep, till it jumped off a cliff to its death (its ok, the sheep was old). The two sheep become confounded, a killed one, in a vision of death in life, of a violence that riddles his story. Disturbed and disturbing.
Where did it all start? In the hard lessons his father taught him? “Don’t get smart with me boy... I’ll put you in the bloody hospital.” In the culture of bullying at Timaru Boy’s High? How will the boy become a man? A Southern man at that? A tender hearted boy? Richey rejects the sweet boy that his friend Anna reminds him of. Perhaps she is his only friend. She is dying anyway. He filters out the saving memories of his childhood, of times spent by the placid Lake Alexandrina. He dismisses his mother.
No shame. That’s the story. That’s the attitude you need to be accepted by your mates. You have to be hard – no shame is the fend when you’re not sure of yourself. Whatever you do, however things turn to shit, the thing is not to show any anxiety, any feelings at all. If you do, you’ll be branded a fag. If you’re labelled a fag, you may as well kill yourself. The trick is not to be noticed. In this world boys learn to say yes because if they say no, they might start questioning you and yeah.
The anti hero of this novel doesn’t play rugby, or any sport. So he’s on the backfoot. But then he discovers that getting wasted and spewing on the sofa is a start towards acceptance and manhood. Serious drinking is his lifeline. And bullying the sideline (If you’re not for us, you’re against us). The trouble is, if you’re not mainstream (who is) it’s hard to tell when you’ve passed the test. You take respect however you get it. Richard Sauer’s rite of passage leaves a trail of havoc. Rugby is the game of this novel; his fall is like a scrum folding. Collapsed or twisted. Is it something that happens or is it self inflicted, Richey wonders. To the reader it seems both, and equally.
If you are leaving school and can’t think of what to do, why not enrol at Varsity (in this case Otago). Get away from the folks, from the claustrophobia of half a city like Timaru. Get a student loan, a lump sum. Get on the piss, do drugs, score a few chicks. Boys will be boys, after all – isn’t this just a stage? Not in this story. This isn’t the rollicking world of Baxter’s Ode to Mixed Flatting. Not a picaresque genre piece like Scarfies. It is a provocative satire, a horror story. It turns squalid and deep, taking the reader into territory that some will recoil from. I suppose it could have been set anywhere-say Hawera, or Brighton. But Shuker knows his Dunedin – cold and dark, dramatically provincial. What a hell of a place to escape to. Talk about isolation. Good for nihilists and sectarians (I love to visit – some of my best friends hail from there).
Over his flat Strangeways looms a deserted castle. It’s at the door of this castle that Richey hammers at the end. No one answers. The Maquis de Sade has been dead a long time. The denouement veers away from life, towards Mishima perhaps.
The Deep South has always been a good setting for the culture of unease; Shuker outdoes his predecessors in the literary virtuosity with which he calls up the familiar demons from the abyss, the abyss whose rim the crowd stumbles along rowdily. Listen to the thoughts, the idiolect of the peer group. Its conformism, its nicknames, its abusiveness, its banality, its brutality, its misogyny, its homophobia. In a word, ugly. And yet for some it’s one big party. A big night that you can’t pike out of.
Fear and loathing in Dundas Street. Don’t drug-induced rampages become boring? Souse’s fall becomes more and more of a stagger. We know he is going to succumb to his demons, but he takes his time. At times it drags, this self-obliteration; Richey gets bored, it takes more and more to get him going. At others, the acuity of his observations skewers attention. There’s a calm about Richey, when he’s not jittery. His observations are beautifully rendered, whether lyrical, dramatic or phantasmagoric. Returning home for a breather “Timaru is silent and gray, a smell like watery tinned salmon drifting up from the harbour.” At an aftermatch function in a motel he notes the youth of the girls on the white couches “sipping beer from plastic Speight’s 500ml cups and some of them look nervous and almost all of them have collars that are standing straight up.”(Lion Breweries may not find all the product placement a positive). Inside a bus in a line of traffic in a snowstorm on the Kilmog “I can only see my own reflection in the window, half-darkened, fluttering and flickering, tentative and ghostlike in the flakes of snow closest to the side of the bus.” It’s not all random:The lighting may be sporadic, but Richey seems to be going somewhere.
On another level the novel is naturalistic, clinical. Given his upbringing, this is what will happen. The expert Dr Johanssen spells it out for Richey in her Book of Murder. How violence is socially learnt. How Richey has lost his self. Where depression and anger will lead him to. What will release him from his paralysis. In a society where violence is socially acceptable. Inertia builds through endless rounds of chaos. In the end he has no choice. He has no identity, he is possessed. The shock of the climax seems a setup, prefigured as it is by his violent opening gambit. The logic is exact.
“Ta go. Who ta go”. Don’t we find the painted tribe picturesque? Hasn’t rugby cleaned up its act? The Lazy Boys brings it back into disrepute. Rugby is never going to be the beautiful game. Here’s Matt, the pizza dough maker, an artist, a sort of friend to Richey. At a clash with the Boks at Carisbrook, the crowd hooliganism gets too much. What he can’t take is the cop-out, the laziness of the spectators who can’t think of anything better to do. “So long as you’re a hard cunt and you hammer another guy, people like you and respect you, right.” Matt sees it as a failure of imagination.
Richey is not allowed to sit in his father’s Lazyboy, but he does anyway. He doesn’t only sit, he masturbates over pornos, volume right down, while his parents sleep overhead.
The after match functions are horrific, even for Richie. He gains admission through mistaken identity, and shows his outsider status in his jitters. Hilariously and disastrously, he tries to confide his malaise to Marc Ellis. This is almost the nadir of his not being understood. Until I got to this section, I was dubious about a dare a friend of mine said he witnessed in a Dunedin bar involving another notable rugby player and a coprographic act. In The Lazy Boys the surreal can be so convincing. The burning sofa on the terraces was another standout performance. The only scene with Maori: Hell’s Angels.
Apart from reading this for the hell of it, is there a lesson in Shuker’s version of the Fall? Even if he doesn’t intend it? A companion to Celia Lashlie? Could a reading of him tell us more about where our boys are going wrong, or at least serve as a warning? Give us second thoughts about sending our kids to Who ta go? It wasn’t as bad as that in our day, was it?
Recently I ran into some Old Boys. Not one of them a Richey – all success stories. When they’d had quite a few, out came the other stories. They reminded me of Ancient Mariners but with a glazed eye rather than a glittering one-not over the gutter yet. It wasn’t pretty. It was obviously the time of their lives. Mate. - Charles Bisley
Carl Shuker has observed that The Lazy Boys, his second novel, after The Method Actors, winner of the 2006 Prize in Modern Letters, tends to be reviewed quite differently inside New Zealand than outside. The Lazy Boys focuses on the psychic disintegration of Richey “Souse” Sauer, nominally a college student a prodigious drinker and adherent to an especially bleak vision of masculinity embodied in the slogan, “No shame.” The novel opens with Souse’s committing of a drunken sexual assault or harassment that he can’t remember, and it culminates in a particularly gruesome attack. New Zealand reviewers recognize the book as a species of densely realized provincial novel, an attempt to depict accurately a nihilism specific to college-age males in southern New Zealand in the early 1990s. North American reviewers, however, tend to view the book as either glorifying or wallowing in that nihilism, reading it as a kind of Less Than Zero for the college set.
Shuker ought to be absolved of this charge, however. Whatever grasp of local detail The Lazy Boys might possess, it also points up an uncanny ambiguity in the language of Souse and his friends, one that can’t be reduced to “glorification.” On the one hand, Shuker captures the testosterone-driven verve of adolescent slang, and shows why this might be appealing to young men worried about their social standing. But he also makes clear how the limited vocabulary of these young men both embodies their emotional limitations and shields them from recognizing it. The novel opens with a five-page overture in which Souse presents his account of the epic drinking that preceded his unremembered assault. Souse and his friends start doing beer bongs in a toilet, and so the word piss comes screaming to the fore: “There’s like piss all over the floor, piss on the walls, piss all over us and the floor’s slippery as and this big like piss and water fight ends up starting”; “I was really pissed too, as well as the floor being real slippery”. But then he accidentally sticks his hand “into this fucking gross blocked up urinal, all people’s piss and those soaps and beer and cigarette butts and ash and shit”. By the bottom of the page, he’s pissed in another sense, too, as his anger and embarrassment about the accident in the toilet lead him to lash out at a woman. What Souse can’t see is that if the excremental casualness of his language braces him against an indifferent world, it also hardens him against his own best impulses, preventing him from experiencing any non-pathological happiness. By the novel’s end, he’ll admit to being “frightened of himself”, but it’s far from clear whether he’s frightened of his rage or his softness.
Shuker’s key insight into Souse’s character is the mantra, “no shame.” It means, “my actions are typical. It says, any offence you feel at my actions is a function of your own naivety; this is how things are done. It says, this is what is reasonable; this is what is acceptable”. While Souse admits the phrase is defensive, he’s necessarily blind to its corrosive effects. Souse likes the phrase’s economy: I do what I do, this is what guys do, accept it or fuck off—all these are encompassed in “no shame.” More, it gives him a clear path of action in any given scenario: Do whatever a friend asks. If something bad happens, then, no shame because it happened in the context of what guys do.
Souse misses the fact that embracing the phrase turns him into a kind of automaton. He almost gets it, but not quite. So, for example, he says early on that his violence “extends directly from my experience, this country, my life ... And when I say ‘I,’ it doesn’t matter, believe me, because there are many others like me”. And he’s fascinated with psychiatric treatises on serial killers and murder-rapists, spending hours in his bedroom collating the circumstances of his life against those of famous psychopaths. What Shuker makes clear is that this apparently sociological argument is in fact just a narcissistic update of “no shame.” Souse’s fear—of himself, of being shown up, of being weak—drives him to pathologize his own actions. It’s as if the horrors he commits accrue, not to himself, but to society. When a young woman near the end of the novel points out that “no shame” is “warped ... It’s not an affirmation. It’s a pity,” it detonates explosively. All he do is beg silently “Don’t you dare” and curse aloud “Fuck ... you”. What’s striking here is that he is someone who doesn’t dare; he acts to avoid daring, because to dare means potential failure. While Shuker presents Souse’s point of view “with conviction”, it’s clear that he doesn’t endorse it.
In the main, Shuker excels at confining himself to Souse’s point of view, and to allowing his insights about the self-destructive posing of adolescent masculinity to emerge obliquely through Souse’s darkening language. Occasionally, though, he can’t let a line or an image get away, and his protagonist says things that sound unlikely. After the novel’s opening party, Souse retreats to his parents house, and, while they’re away, tortures the dog, masturbates on his father’s chair until he bleeds, wets his bed, and fires a gun through the family television. But he also is able to notice that “Dad’s got his weight on one foot and his hips cocked casually; his body forms the shape of a parenthesis behind and beyond Mum who stands, shoulders squared to me, her focus completely on me, with that almost smug air of certainty, of someone who knows their back is covered”. Even the way the alliteration develops throughout this sentence makes it seem unlikely to have emanated from Souse’s consciousness.
And then there’s Anna, almost the only person besides his parents who still calls Souse “Richey.” Anna haunts the novel: We find out in an epigraph that she has died, killing herself after the return of cancer. Throughout the novel, we read letters from her to Souse that remember a time when Souse’s affective palette was less monochrome, and he spends a considerable amount of psychic energy denying that these emotions and this psychological flexibility are still available to him. Finally, he ends up thinking, “Forgiveness is temporary and time is short and she is dead”. Souse does speak in a compressed tone, but the economy and rhythm of this sentence sound too sophisticated for him.
Beyond its evident interest in the desperate self-alienation that is one response to male adolescent crisis, The Lazy Boys does offer a recognizable, if bleak, portrait of college life, especially in its attachment to music. Kurt Cobain’s death is probably the most significant world event in the novel, and almost the only moment of connection happens when somebody discovers a copy of “The Draize Train”. Souse and his friends are in college at time when New Zealand has just defunded higher education, shifting to a so-called “user-pays” system. The ramifications of this approach, including the way it re-introduces certain kinds of class anxieties at strange moments, are everywhere in the novel, though that would probably be clearer to a New Zealand readership. The Lazy Boys deserves a wide readership, especially among those interested in young people and the way they can, as Freud said of neurotics, “escape into illness.” - Jason B. Jones
The criminal and the victim alike return to the scene of the crime…
It is the Arab Spring and the fate of the Christians of the Middle East is uncertain. The many Christians of Lebanon are walking a knife-edge, their very survival in their ancestral refuge in doubt, as the Lebanese government becomes Hezbollah-dominated, while Syria convulses with warring religious factions. Anti Lebanon is a cross-genre political thriller and horror story embedded within these recent events, featuring a multiethnic Christian family living out the lingering after-effects of Lebanon’s civil war as it struggles to deal with its phantoms, its ghosts, and its vampires.
Leon Elias is a young and impoverished Lebanese man whose older sister had joined a Christian militia and has been killed. He becomes caught up in the recent “little war” in Beirut, when the Shi’a resistance/militia Hezbollah takes over most of the city. In this milieu—the emptied streets of Christian east Beirut, the old shell-scarred sandstone villas, the echoing gunfire—he becomes involved, only partly by choice, in the theft of a seriously valuable piece of artisanal jewelry, and is bitten—like a vampire—by its Armenian maker.
Events take a ghostly and mysterious turn as the factions jostling for power in Beirut begin to align against him and his family, and he is forced to flee the sullied beauty of that wonderful and pitiful country, in this story of love and loss, of the civil war and the Arabization of the “Switzerland of the Middle East,” and of contemporary vampires—beings addicted to violence, lies, and baser primal drives.
Carl Shuker is a remarkable writer. A storyteller in the tradition of Celine and J. G. Ballard, no one alive writes better sentences. Anti Lebanon will delight his fans and entrance anyone new to his fine work.
"Anti Lebanon is an extremely exciting book. It seems to suggest we can go anywhere with the novel, that it can contain anything. It’s masterful in its form and the story it tells is compelling, original and important." —Pip Adam, Scoop Review of Books
In the midst of the Arab Spring, Beirut is experiencing a chaotic flux of soldiers, martyrs, and security guards. New Zealand-born novelist Shuker (The Lazy Boys) places at its center Leon, a brooding Christian Lebanese filmmaker, and commences with a rather standard thriller plot. Complicit in the theft of artisanal jewelry meant for a wealthy buyer in Iran, Leon finds himself wanted by the varying factions vying for power in Beirut. The situation takes a strange turn, however, when Leon is bitten by the jewels' Armenian maker and possibly transformed into a modern vampire, a primal being who, as his father explains, cannot be trusted. Hovering in the fringes of the war-torn city, Leon then traverses a nightmarish landscape of demons as Shuker crafts a dark noir that is equal parts allegorical and hallucinogenic. Though the intricacies of the plot require a working understanding of Middle Eastern politics and the power dynamics at play during Arab Spring, one cannot help but be captivated by the slow, mournful mood and atmosphere of Shuker's Beirut. Combining a thriller and a horror story into a single melancholic narrative, Shuker has created a haunting and riveting account of war, loss, and exile.—Publishers Weekly
I’m tempted to say that Carl Shuker’s novel Anti Lebanon is full of twists, but twists isn’t the right word—it’s more like the novel’s trajectory repeatedly escapes the reader’s expectations, driving into increasingly alien terrain.
Anti Lebanon begins as a somewhat traditional novel focused on Leon Elias, “thirty years old, East Beiruti Greek Orthodox.” Leon has dropped out of university, leaving his degree in hydrogeology unfinished. Leon has since taken a job as the security guard of an abandoned amusement park, a symbolic stand-in for Lebanon’s tourist economy. The Arab Spring has destabilized Lebanon, leaving its Christian population in a precarious position as Hezbollah dominates the government—and the streets. After dropping out of school, Leon creates an experimental short film, In the anti Lebanon, a film “about his family and his sister and their history” — a history of mixed cultures (Leon’s mother is Japanese) and pain (his sister, a soldier, was assassinated).
The early parts of Anti Lebanon seem to set the stage for a fairly conventional novel with strong political overtones, one that explores Leon’s guilt over his sister’s violent death and his conflicted place as a sensitive and artistic soul who’s the son an infamous warrior, all set against the backdrop of Christian Lebanon in the tumult of the Arab Spring. But then Shuker takes us other places. Lots of other places.
The crucible for this change comes after a night of drinking ends in violence and theft. I don’t want to spoil too much—this is a novel that constantly had me rereading entire passages, asking, Wait, what?—but let’s just say Leon, complicit in a crime, ends up moving a body by motorcycle. Let me share some of Shuker’s prose in a passage that reveals the novel’s major metaphysical gambit:
This time there was no crash and it probably was the alcohol but the pain of the thing’s biting was gristly and sharp and also distant and allied with the shock of the fall so he rode though it for it seemed several dozen feet— the most important thing was not to fall again. He came to a controlled halt, stopped the bike, and then over his shoulder punched the thing’s face several times, his knuckle hitting soft then hitting helmet, and it bit again and this time harder and it stung and went deeper, a popping sound or feeling in his neck that suddenly got desperately deep and he punched again and then he rolled violently and writhed in the grasp of the thing they had created and he fell over deliberately, twisting so as to topple over sideways upon and hurt and stop the thing, and he hit the ground landing on its arm and this dislodged the biting helmeted head and he pulled up its hands and wriggled away over the concrete like his sister palming herself away from her disappeared foot and he scrambled up, and the thing just lay there inert and still, wired to the scooter in a position absurd, all tied up and crooked and ruined and wrong. He stood and held his hot neck looking at the fallen boy and then knew that someone else was there.
Is Leon now a vampire? The novel answers this question clearly even as it refuses to explain or define what, exactly, being a vampire means. Anti Lebanon at times threatens to become an allegory of Mideast politics and history, using vampirism as its major trope, but then Shuker shifts us into new, weird territory. An appropriately Borgesian chapter titled “Labyrinth” moves Leon and the reader into a propulsive engine of dream logic; we’re never quite sure exactly what is happening as Leon gives over to dark, primal violence.
Such violence inheres from history and geography and mythology. It’s worth sharing another passage at length to see how Shuker traces these contours, plunging character and reader into history’s strange tangles. Here, vampire Leon drinks a guard’s lifeblood—the beginning of an oblique spree—and tunnels into mythos, plumbing the history of his land to arrive at his sister’s murder:
Semi-unhinged single Christian men, living alone in brutalist concrete boxes on the borderlands with their rage and a shrieking TV, a simonized gun and a cross on the wall, were approached and made use of. Aries, Andromeda, and Perseus slowly wheeled across the dead guard’s sunglasses. Christian snipers took positions around Mar Mikhael overlooking Electricité du Liban. A secret. Leon, labyrinthine, tunneled from shadow to shadow. The criminal and the victim alike return to the scene of the crime. Would the Israelis come? The taste of blood was hot: There was juniper, vetyver, and chypres too, copper drying down to a powder, wealth and breadth of deathless rivers in endless cycle, over centuries, aeons, untouched and untouchable: Nahr al Kalb, the dog river, collecting on its rock walls the signatures of dead empires: the steles of Ramses II, Nebuchadnezzar, Napoleon III and Caracalla, General Gouraud and The XXI British Army Corps with Le Détachement Français de Palestine et Syrie occupied Beirut and Tripoli: October 1918 AD; and Nahr Ibrahim, the blood river, which flows red: iron-rich soil rusting, seeding red anemones of the rebirth along its banks. The land still bearing the imprint of its creator, still running with the blood of Adonis in cascades; cataracts of rust. The march crossed the exact point on the Green Line where the Black Saturday ID checkpoints were erected once upon a time and to cross was to have your ID checked for religion and your throat cut in the passenger seat, watched over by Phalange HQ, past Makhlouf’s sandwich store— his weakness, his frailty. He told her about the last shot, what he alone saw: that the assassin didn’t even look as he ruined her; as he ruined him.
From here—well, let’s just say that Leon goes, and that the book moves into a picaresque rhythm, erupting with Bolañoesque moments of horror and strange shifts into the unreal (there’s a moment at the end of an episode in Israel that confounded everything I’d read so far in the book, the effect approaching alterity). It would spoil too much of Anti Lebanon to delineate all its movements; suffice to say its unsettling shifts are grounded in motifs of dogs, water, film, art, crashes, the peri, the vampire.
Shuker’s book isn’t for everyone. Those looking for a classic Gothic horror or a sexy vampire romp will likely be disappointed (and probably confused). Shuker also throws his reader into the metaphorical deep end of Mideast politics and history, offering little exposition that might help explain some of the complexity. There’s a trust in the reader there that I admire (even as I often headed to Wikipedia to learn about Lebanon’s civil wars, the Druze, its relationship to Syria, Palestine, Israel…). That trust is best returned to the author—a trust to follow him where he goes, because frankly you won’t be able to see ahead. Anti Lebanon is unpredictable, strange, and very rewarding. -
When a writer known for their success in the literary world goes slumming in the genre ghetto, one never knows what might result. For example, you may find solid work that’s more than offset by stunningly pompous and condescending attitudes, as in the case of Susan Hill. You may be the recipient of impressive imaginings, accented by blindly ignorant denials, as with Margaret Atwood. You may get stellar, albeit demanding and peculiar, tales accompanied by acceptance — even grudging embrace — of genre influences, as in the case of Cormac McCarthy.
I have no idea how New Zealand writer Carl Shuker — recipient of the 2006 Prize in Modern Letters for his debut novel, and a frequent critical darling — feels about genre fiction, but his latest novel, Anti Lebanon, certainly utilizes genre constructs to great advantage, resulting in a novel that mixes its ingredients almost seamlessly, and borders on brilliance before retreating a bit.
As its title implies, the book is set in Lebanon, where Arab Spring has brought even more uncertainty than usual to the lives of the Christians there, virtually ostracized by a Hezbollah-dominated government and caught in the crossfire between other warring religious factions. Against this backdrop, we meet thirty-year-old Leon Elias, college-educated as a hydrogeologist (and Lebanon’s water resources are a recurring theme here) but underemployed as a security guard. His father, Didi, a former military hero, is likewise working below his expected station, because he backed the wrong horse during one epoch of the unending jockeying between Lebanon’s many factions, while Leon’s sister, Keiko, was murdered for posing a political threat via her growing prominence. The complications in Leon’s personal life are like a microcosmic version of the various relationships and intrigues that entangle the entire nation. As Leon’s father says at one point:
“Politics in this country is one long and very dangerous soap opera full of lies and repetitions and clichés. Every episode’s climax leads to no resolution. We are in season fifty-eight at least, and few of the original cast remain. Apart from those grizzled old men— like me— who are typecast and cannot get another job.”
One drunken night, everything changes for Leon, as the following passage foreshadows:
It was that time of a night when a certain drunken sweet spot hit. People began to say what they really thought, in the generous context of what they’d said that they didn’t really think before and had gotten away with. When the smart and bored began to push the limits of what others would tolerate, and when abrupt furies and half-felt passions turned into speeches; whims turned accusations.
It’s abrupt fury that leads a friend of Leon to accidentally kill a fellow reveler with a punch, leading to Leon taking a late-night trip to dump the body, the corpse balanced precariously behind him on his scooter. It’s towards the end of that journey, when the body suddenly stirs and bites Leon on the neck, that things really take a turn for the strange.
Meanwhile, in a flashback that is gradually revealed, we learn that Leon had created an experimental film and submitted it to a local competition, an act that eventually leads him to a presentation that purports to tell of the history of the vampire in Lebanon. Rarely seen and only half understood, the vampires of Anti Lebanon have relatively little in common with the familiar western version, leaning more toward the pyr, fallen angels in Persian mythology.
…pyr have slept in the Lebanon for long, long before this, the lecturer said. He was perhaps picked up— like a germ— by Godfrey de Bouillon and Peter the Hermit somewhere in the Serbian forests between Belgrade and Nish on the First Crusade, accidentally recruited on the march toward Jerusalem. Suspicion and the pogrom revive the pyr and give it vivid life. Any troop of soldiers with cynical leadership, a sacred cause, and little in the way of qualms is the pyr’s natural habitat. The pyr is lost in time; he haunts the present, and lost in the labyrinth, haunts all times.
There is never a traditional “conversion” of the bitten victim to vampire, in the sense that readers of western vampire fiction will be familiar with. In fact, there remains significant uncertainty as to what, if anything will happen to Leon after his bite. Mystery, as well as some occasionally mystifying events, ensue, interspersed with some truly memorable descriptive passages such as:
The unfinished bridge over the intersection hulked in shade, just an archway now, the on-ramps never built, all graffitied, weeds growing from its stump, flags and faded banners drooping from its parapets. Here everything temporary is permanent.
and:
Semi-unhinged single Christian men, living alone in brutalist concrete boxes on the borderlands with their rage and a shrieking TV, a simonized gun and a cross on the wall, were approached and made use of.
Halfway through Anti Lebanon, I thought it was the best novel that I’d read this year, and potentially the best I’d read in several years. Unfortunately, Shuker loses control of his narrative a bit in the latter stages of the book, coincident with Leon’s meanderings beyond Lebanon’s borders. Despite its somewhat disappointing conclusion, Anti Lebanon remains a truly impressive melding of genre elements with mainstream sensibilities. I hope Shuker’s dabblings in the dark are not a one-time experiment; return visits would be most welcome. - twilightridge.net/I wasn’t born for interviews,” Shuker says, shifting slightly in his chair. His modesty belies an understated opulence with his words that he displays over the next forty or so minutes. He’s just spent a similar amount of time talking to National Radio. Two days before he had a glorious technicolour, full-page picture in the Sunday Star-Times, complete with gonzo-laced Steve Braunias profile. He really wasn’t blowing smoke up my arse when he told me on the phone the night before that he “was a little interviewed out.”
