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Irvine Welsh alludes to things. |
This is a story about two stories, one
slung by someone you might not yet know (but undoubtedly will),
the other by someone you undoubtedly know (and will not soon
forget). What links these stories is absolutely nothing —except
sheer unmitigated insanity.
Let’s
begin with the name you know but will never ever trust. We mean
Irvine Welsh, dig? He of Porno, Glue, Filth
and, yes, a little dirty ditty entitled Trainspotting.
Welsh’s name is legend among a certain subset of transgressives,
but it is too not without a wieldy marquee value within
the mainstream.
Which
may explain why in The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs
(Norton, $14.95), Welsh makes damn sure the marquee comes
down on more than a few numb skulls.
We
shan’t spoil the story here (nab the book), but we will tell you
that it involves hexes and identity and narcotics and sex and,
from beginning to bitter end, stoops to a transcendent new low
in storytelling.
Really.
Equally
lowly, if not lower, is Steven Hall, another in a storied
line of transgressives who don’t mind deepening the inner ripe
of life’s unease, just so long as there’s a wisecrack
accompaniment. It’s no accident that Hall seems to be undergoing
the same amount of hoopla that befell Welsh way back when he
first spotted trains: His work is wild, his work is wicked and
his work is unlike any other work you have ever read.
That’s
what The Independent said about Hall’s debut, The Raw
Shark Texts (Canongate, $24), and then they said some more,
going so far as to speculate that he’d one day provoke Auster-
or Murakami-size inspiration among the next generation of
fabulists.
And will
he. Dubbed slipstream by the pulp literati, Hall’s oeuvre
encompasses all the sci-fi, fantasy, horror, mystery and realism
that the tag suggests, and then twists the lot of ’em into a
whole new further. Like Secrets, Shark is unhelped
by a casual spoiling. That it involves memory-devouring
predators won’t get you anywhere, nor will the fact that the
love of the protagonist’s life is dead and has been for three
years.
And
despite the breathless clashing of precedents (“Memento
meets Wizard of Oz meets Labyrinth meets Jaws?”),
there really are no precedents for what Hall has pulled off.
Like Welsh and Palahniuk and Self and the above-named Auster and
Murakami, as well as the oft-cited Borges and Kafka, Hall
catches where catch too often can’t, and in the doing he’s
digging a deep that’s as blue as it is menacing. And after a
very long day in the world, don’t we all wanna know what really
lies beneath?
Steven Hall reads from
The Raw Shark Texts at 4
p.m. Sunday. Irvine Welsh reads from The
Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs at 8 p.m. Tuesday.
Both events will be held at Books & Books, 265 Aragon
Ave., Coral Gables. Call 305-442-4408. Hood is online at
therealjohnhood.com. |
