Review
Love is as strong as death, as hard as hell
The story begins on Good Friday. Our porn star narrator, drunk on bourbon, paranoid on cocaine, crashes his car off a mountain. When the vehicle comes to a stop, upside-down, it bursts into flames, roasting our trapped hero like a pig on a spit. The whisky he spilt on his lap acts as an accelerant, ensuring his penis goes up like a candle. The car slips further and slides into a creek, the water saving his life.
Purification through fire.
We learn much about the treatment and rebuilding of a burns victim; the use of maggots to remove dead flesh; débridement, the cutting away of putrefying tissue; and the various forms of grafts, including the use of pigskin.
We hear of his trailer trash upbringing and survival of children’s homes; and his career in the skin trade, graduating from in-demand sustainable erection to writer and producer of pornography.
Mind focused on the future, he plans his suicide in exhaustive detail.
Enter Marianne Engel. “You’ve been burned. Again.”
A psychiatric patient at the hospital, Marianne claims to be 700 years old, and that the narrator is her long-dead lover returned to her.
Why does he believe her? The angel wings tattooed on her back? The ability, like Scheherazade, to spin tales from feudal Japan, medieval Italy, Victorian England, and Viking Iceland? Her mission to set hearts free by carving huge gargoyles out of stone, and selling them to the rich and quirky? Or the fact that she wants to take a man whose burns are described as ‘fourth degree’ on a guided tour of Dante’s circles of hell?
This immensely ambitious novel uses the themes of the four elements, Earth, Fire, Air and Water; it employs literary references such as Dante both figuratively and literally; its storytelling tangents demonstrate skill and intelligence; while the acrostics of first and last letters of each chapter signal a sense of humour. But the fundamental message is a classic; the power of love to redeem. Our self-interested, cynical misanthrope, nerve endings and beauty gone, begins to care. “Only after my skin was burned away did I finally become able to feel.”
Profoundly satisfying, this journey to belief is seductive, through its oddly appealing characters, the classical imagery, an epic variety of settings, and the author’s fabulous storytelling. As I put it down, I gave it my highest accolade.
‘I wish I’d written that.’
First published in Words with JAM magazine
