Rishyashring Raman Iyer
DISCLAIMER: My review of this book may be prejudiced. I should practically hate this book as this made me clean the coffee that I sprayed out of my nostrils before I could complete the first page.
No wonder they say “comic” timing when it comes to humour. That’s why only an established comic artist, with over a hundred issues of X-men and other comics under his belt that you’d have never heard of unless you’re a comic book fan, can generate such a hilarious piece of work. Apparently inspired from a set of bizarre happenings that were sent to him by fans, this novel follows the exploits of a private eye Mike McGill.
Alarmed by the dwindling morals in the US, the chief secretary of state wants Mike to find a written form of US constitution written on an alien meteor that would indulge anyone who wants to read it to combat the perversions in the society. For all the supernatural fans out there, imagine the reaper that Dean killed in the last episode of season 10 (I should have mentioned SPOILER ALERT! before); the secretary is as old and as annoying as him. If the universe has a grudge against someone for no reason it would be against the protagonist; things that happens to him happens in the worst possible way. Living in a dilapidated corner of New York City (just imagine living somewhere in Kolkata), fighting with an invincible rat that just deposited its kidney’s by-products into his coffee, he is given half a million dollars of advance to find the lost book.
Mike teams up with a misogynist bisexual girl named Trix and enters a world like never seen before: sexual fetishes of Godzillas ensuring propagation of their genes, bulky Aryan homosexual dudes with a novel albeit cringe-worthy use of saline water, a drug addled former presidential candidate some other scenarios that can only be depicted with a bunch of asterisks. This features everything that is wrong with the world today: weird sexual fetishes, drug-induced political scandals, hatred against aliens (not the Dr. Zoidberg types), abuse of power by the one-percent, and the shift of Governments to become big-brothers. More importantly, it makes us speculate over an important question: is freedom that allows the society to deteriorate worth it? Just kidding, only pretentious snotty English majors would infer all this. Readers like me would just roll on the floor laughing and try to ensure that the eyes stay in their sockets despite excessive rolling in response to the sarcasm.
Penmanship does count in a novel. Despite the crass concepts and wince-inducing scenarios, the novel stays surprising classy. Although overly exaggerated, the characters are relatable to some level. Personally Mike McGill, the detective who stays on his leather couch in smelly clothes due to lack of clients, appeals to me for some reason while I sit on my beanbag putting off shower for another day on a Saturday evening. At the end of the novel, after you clean up the choked up coffee and wipe the tears off your eyes, you’d end up noticing how we’ve all changed in the last decade. You realize that the hills are alive with the sound of people being promiscuous.
Another interesting thing about the novel is the fact that it lacks any relation or references to any comics that Warren Ellis is known for. There was a giant celebration among literature lovers when he turned to prose; he satisfied them in a way that nobody expected. Of course, it’s not a perfect novel; nobody expects an absurdist author to write a perfect novel. In its own way, it slowly crawls through our crooked red veins to earn a permanent place in our heart.
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