What if the afterlife is not any glamorous inferno, celestial paradise or reincarnation lottery however a bureaucratic nightmare, overfull and under-resourced, the place you bear in mind your loss of life however have a second one to sit up for after a contemporary spherical of ageing and illness? Worst of all, what in the event you needed to get a job there – manufacturing umbrellas, say – with a view to pay for fundamental items and drink away your woes because it dawns on you that no one on this realm is aware of what’s occurring?
Steve Toltz’s fabulously spectacular third novel, following the 2008 Booker-shortlisted A Fraction of the Entire and 2015’s Quicksand, cannonballs straight into heady existential questions, magicking up a imaginative and prescient of human life without delay beneficiant and absurd whereas sporting its appreciable ambition flippantly. Very flippantly. A number of pages in, realising that the story is advised in a compulsively jokey, determined-to-impress voice with even the dialogue consisting fully of well-timed one-liners and off-the-cuff aphorisms, I groaned: “Oh Christ – 400 pages.” However a headstrong novelist units the parameters of their very own realism, and shortly the type clicked. As soon as it did, I struggled to maintain observe of how a lot there was to admire in Toltz’s relentlessly full of life sentences, offbeat insights and unfaltering narrative power.
Like Kevin Spacey’s character at first of American Magnificence, our narrator Angus Mooney pronounces straight off the bat that he's lifeless. He finds this situation acutely embarrassing, having in life “put all my eggs within the basket of bodily loss of life and persona extinction” solely to seek out himself rudely woke up in an affrontingly mundane hereafter. Angus’s pre-death human profession was not distinguished: introduced up by foster dad and mom, he fell into petty crime and substance abuse however cleaned up his act and located love in his early 40s with Gracie. A wilful and opinionated girl with new age tendencies, you’d name her a power of nature if it weren’t for her habit to digital life: “She couldn’t put down her fucking cellphone. And, worse, my spouse had a ‘social media presence’.”
Very on-line Gracie emotes, opines and aphorises (“I consider the one factor worse than being sexually objectified is just not being sexually objectified”) whereas selling her enterprise as a wedding celebrant, paid to make subversively candid speeches at weddings. Later within the novel, she may even give speeches at births after which, as a far worse pandemic than Covid-19 tears throughout the planet, at ritual suicides, paying tribute to the human race. These caustically comedian disquisitions give Toltz a platform for Swiftian state-of-the-species value determinations. “We declared ethical chapter and stored on spending!” “Admit it. We have been solely at our greatest once we have been on MDMA.”
In interviews, Toltz has namechecked such main miserabilists because the aphorist EM Cioran and the misanthrope’s misanthrope Thomas Bernhard, whereas one in every of Right here Goes Nothing’s epigraphs is from the extra obscure Peter Wessel Zapffe, who took philosophical pessimism to its death-metal excessive. An engagement with the good “No” to life is clearly a part of his mental equipment, however Toltz is an excessive amount of of a humorist to throw his weight absolutely into naysaying, andraises wisecracking to one thing just like the standing of a worldview.
After Gracie turns into pregnant, an odious previous man named Owen Fogel weasels his method into their residence. Owen admits that Hobbes’s description of life as nasty, brutish and brief might additionally describe him as an individual. However by the point Angus involves suspect him of ulterior motives, he’s already being murdered. Getting his bearings within the afterworld, Angus learns that he’s forged up in Lagaria, a “provincial outpost between two medium-sized cities”. On this tawdry parallel dimension, harried volunteers battle to course of the inflow of freshly deceased; the hereafter’s strained civic infrastructure calls to thoughts the refugee disaster to which Toltz’s native Australia has responded with especial callousness. Nevertheless, although Right here Goes Nothingperpetually threatens to decide to allegory, it's higher served by the paradox it maintains.
In alternating chapters, Angus narrates his habituation to Lagaria and retains pained tabs on Gracie and Owen. The afterlife conceit offers the joker Toltz ample alternatives for ironic reversal and laser-guided quip – “Are you prepared?” “I died prepared” – whereas additionally permitting his first-person narration to transition easefully into third-person omniscience. Consuming on the excellently named bar the Bitter in Soul, the lifeless battle to simply accept their lot: “Dying had introduced many people to the brink of suicide. We have been ashamed of our lives and now we have been ashamed of our afterlives.” Romantic risk is a lacklustre mirror to its pre-mortal variant: “Wearying monogamy, empty informal intercourse, doomed polyamory, unhygienic intercourse events, soul-destroying solitude. Even right here, there wasn’t a single further possibility.”
Studying of a backstreet vendor who can organize interdimensional journeys facilitated by DMT injection and immersion in a floatation tank, Angus spends his wages compulsively haunting his former residence. These emotionally charged multiverse voyages jogged my memory of Brit Marling’s elegant Netflix sequence The OA, although the place that present opted for kamikaze earnestness, Toltz’s comedian but gnostic imaginative and prescient echoes Milan Kundera’s ambition for the novel: “To convey collectively the intense gravity of the query and the intense lightness of the shape.” Toltz takes his time with every guide – new ones have appeared at seven-year intervals – and Right here Goes Nothingis a humorous, intelligent, entertaining argument in favour of cultivating the endurance to get it proper.
Post a Comment