Read it in: about two weeks, if I remember correctly

I first picked this one up because I love Nick Cave’s music.  I’ve only recently come across him, with his new album ‘Push the Sky Away‘.  I thought the lyrics were singularly the most amazing thing I could ever conceive of.  Strange at times (well, most of the time), but I liked them in a strange sort of sense.

So I knew this book would contain some strange things, and it did, but it was powerful and memorable at the same time.  It was dark, very dark, with lots of religious themes thrown in, madness, death, violence and destruction.  Interesting to read, if depressing.

It’s about Euchrid Eucrow, who lives in the (you would assume) deep South, remote town of Ukulore, whose residents are all unnervingly religious, even Euchrid himself, although his beliefs differ somewhat to that of the other townsfolk, hence he is an outcast.  More loneliness and isolation.  I made a point in my last post that all the books I seem to read these days seem to be about isolation.  Or maybe it’s just all the books these days.

Anyway, so into this small, religious community arrives Beth, an angelic looking child who is taken in by the townsfolk and raised as a miracle child, their own personal saviour.  Euchrid develops a strange, long-distance, barely connected relationship with Beth, half-despising her and half almost devoted to her.  We see the downward spiral of Euchrid’s life, starting off low to begin with and sliding down into desolation, madness.  It’s an interesting transition.

I feel like, in this novel, no one is quite human (that is, human as we know it to be).  Everybody is carried along by their own passions, their own hyperactive versions of faith, their sorrows and their joys.  Nobody is normal.  Not even the little girl who was raised to be perfect is truly free of this.

Yes, this book is depressing, utterly depressing, especially as we know what the ending is from about halfway through, and we are simply waiting and waiting for it to come about.  But what makes this book bearable and, most of all, a very interesting read, is Nick Cave’s descriptions of things and simply the way that he writes.  Instead of using ‘I’ as a typical first-person narrator would, he uses ‘ah’, like “Do you think that ah don’t know what’s running through your minds?”, “Mah skull is polluted with sickly poetry” and “standing in the turret that ah built upon the roof of mah clapboard castle”, you get the idea.  It results in a very different kind of read, in which you can hear Euchrid’s voice in his deep-South accent as if he were talking to you, instead of almost the absence of a physical voice in other books, especially those narrated in third person.

And I do have a quote for you.  There’s just something about Cave’s prose, the despair, the eventuality of it all, that makes me so attracted to it.  Here’s a little poem that’s in the book that shouldn’t give too much away (hopefully):

‘It seems you’re inching unner, sir, inching slowly unnerBut what it is you’re inching in, ah cannot help but wonder.’
O booming voice up in the clouds, to speak cuts like a knife
Ah’m simply inching into Death, while inching out of Life.
‘You’re wrong, you poor deluded boy, True Death’s up here with Me
Hell’s dungeons boil below you, child, Eternal Agony!’
O climb down off your crap-hill, O fiend hid in the sky
You’re Lucifer!  The Great Deceiver!  Your word is but a lie!
You will not fool me anymore with your wrath and rolling thunder
‘Tis God that stands behind mah wheel and inches me now unner.
The bog it yawned and pulled me down, mah body trussed in chains
And Satan sighed and shook his head, played harp amongst the flames.
‘It’s Hell up there in Heaven too, for all that that is worth.
Heaven is just a lie of mine to make it Hell on Earth.’ (from page 212)

Nice, hey?  Anyway, that’s the other thing.  While the prose is scattered with deep-South speech, it’s also home to a lot of religious and old English speech, such as the good old ‘thou’, ‘thus’ and so on.  It’s quite a contrast and gives this novel an incredibly unique voice.

Read it if you: like experimental literature, appreciate good prose, do not have clinical depression, like madness of the human soul

While reading listen to: well, of course I have to recommend Nick Cave here.  He wrote the damn book.  So listen to Finishing Jubilee Street, Higgs Boson Blues, Hallelujah (start this one at 1:39)