Culture

The opening sentence of this book describes a brutal murder. An old man is first knocked down with a bicycle pump and then beaten to death with a spade. The one-legged, unnamed narrator, however, doesn’t want to explain his crime right away; more important to him is his friendship with John Divney, who works on his farm. The two men don’t have even one single minute apart during their three-year friendship. They sleep together, work together, and don’t socialise with anybody else. The thing is, the two friends actually hate each other. They murdered the old man together for his box of money, which Divney then hid. The narrator won’t leave his side until he shows him where the money is.

The eventual revelation of the money box’s location triggers a change in the narrator, who is transported into a cruel, absurd, Alice in Wonderland-type world: “it was as if daylight had changed with unnatural suddenness, as if the temperature of the evening had altered greatly in an instant or as if the air had become twice as rare or twice as dense as it had been in the winking of an eye; perhaps all of these things happened together for all my senses were bewildered all at once and could give me no explanation.”

Mathers, the man he killed, is there. The narrator speaks to him while averting his eyes from his terribly maimed body. Mathers sends the narrator to the policemen, who hold all the wisdom of the universe but are completely preoccupied with a deep, romantic love of bicycles. With frequent bicycle riding, the molecules of the policemen swap with those of the bikes, and each take on qualities of the other. The policemen have to prop themselves up against walls when they stand still, and the bicycles sometimes get caught in terrifyingly human acts.

The narrator explains various aspects of this new world by footnoting the opinions of his hero, de Selby, a scientist and philosopher to whom he has devoted his life and on whom he has written a book. The comments are convincingly written nonsense, such as: “a) that darkness was simply an accretion of ‘black air,’ i.e., a straining of the atmosphere due to volcanic eruptions too fine to be seen by the naked eye and also to certain ‘regrettable’ industrial activities involving coal-tar by-products and vegetable dyes; and (b) that sleep was simply a series of fainting fits brought on by semi-asphyxiation.” One of his footnotes goes on for six half-pages, and covers de Selby’s belief that his mother is a man, a possible cure for cancer, and some military tactics.

The book is very funny, but also very disturbing. There is a recurring theme of infinity, which really creeped me out. One of the policemen makes a carved wooden box which is so beautiful that the only thing he can bear to put inside it is another identical box, and another one in that, a process that goes on and on until the boxes are so small they become invisible. Events repeat themselves, reflections in mirrors go back for years, and time stops and starts according to the policemen’s strange laws of physics.

My copy of the book is second-hand and is falling to pieces. I had to keep fishing dropped pages off the floor and rearranging them into the correct order, which seemed appropriate considering the book’s content. I wouldn’t call it an easy read, but if you are into horror, hell, eternity, and meaninglessness, this is the book for you.