I have been enjoying the Sandman Slim series of novels by Richard Kadrey for years. This week I just finished his latest novel, The Grand Dark. It is a revelation. I will place it, in my ultimate library right next to Gene Wolfe's 'The Land Across'. The new book, The Grand Dark, takes place in what could be described as an alternate Mitteleurope postwar near future. It's at once both futuristic and retro, a brilliant creation in which serves as a kind of gothic background for a tale of youth and innocence lost, repression, rebellion and decadence. In describing it thus, having read it, I find myself getting excited about something I'm sure I wouldn't have been excited about had I read an overview. It's Kadrey, a writer of wondrously dark imagination. There's not much of any other way to describe him now as the caretaker of the morality of dark degenerates.
So start with the phrase 'entartete kunst', and imagine an American 1980s romantic punk sensibility in a Reagan era where the CIA was not turned against Soviet Russia, but against Americans whose common folks had turned to a minimally employed louche cokeheads and heroin addicts. Imagine thin wastelings like the Pet Shop Boys, East end punks in tattered jackets looking after scores with West End girls, dragging on Shermans all black lipsticked in sheer gauzy blouses. Imagine a precisely speaking man in small hornrimmed glasses dressed formally with a preternatural intelligence lording over a bicycle delivery service with a ratpack of couriers looking just out of the workhouses of Oliver Twist. Imagine a grimy industrial city barely hanging on to civility patrolled by automatons, robot taxi drivers, spiderlike police bots. Imagine disfigured war veterans who wear steel masks covering their deformities grumbling to themselves on public transit everywhere you go.
The Grand Dark is the pseudonym of the theatre of the absurd in which the most crumbly of human dramas are shot through with sexual drama and political innuendo that caters to the most ribald and degenerate sensibilities of a bounding youth and a slumming aristocracy - where poets and students and grand dames & dukes meet at opioid cocktail parties signifying about the potential of transgressive creativity, each production aiming to rise the level of shock and awe to that of civilizational neutron bombs. And around every corner are the brutal police and the even more vicious secret police.
The novel is the story of a naif and his lover, an actress, two against the whole demonic world. Like Forrest Gump stranded in Milan Kundera's Prague, Kadrey's protagonist Largo struggles against the news of the world as he manages to escape its crushing jaws by inches every day. He is animated by his passionate love for Remy whose love and life are romantically reckless in the way only an energetic and beautiful youth animates to the stunned jealousies of the jaded who surround her at work. Their love is true and it surpasses all until things with gravity and grit get their grubby ways. Remy disappears. Largo struggles to find Remy. Has she abandoned him? Is she lost? Kidnapped? Dying of the miasmic vapors of this cruel industrial wasteland?
In all ways subtle and clever, Kadrey's world pulls you into its twisted orbit, drowning you in gothic mystery and the horror of war, the heat and hate of the beat down humans and the intrigues of revolution and counter-revolution. It is a world of creeping cold claustrophobia, like Terry Gilliam's Brazil set in Eastern Europe. Kadrey's writing simply and occasionally brings you directly into the head-pounding despair of a sweet young man fighting for his very survival in a world intent on destroying all that gives him hope.
In all this, Kadrey has brought me face to face with something I would not have known how to approach - which is how one who is weak and powerless with no cause to hope and no ethos beyond survival lives at the mercy of sophisticates who see in him only a means to crafty ends. Largo's degeneracy is genuine. He is a son of the underbelly of society, and no he doesn't know how to tie a tie. He doesn't jog for his health, he grabs on to the parcel of peace that can be purchase by a couple of drops of opioid under the tongue, by the hot breath of his lady love, by the thrill of outrunning the gangsters out to bash his brains. And so we are left breathless trailing a youth with none of the degraded common sense of a degraded time, yet whose honesty is the only sort that can reflect the humanity of those who struggle on the daily. He is dirty and unsubtle. He is weak and frightened. He is used by inches in ways he cannot comprehend and all he can do is try to stand up straight and stand up for his friends. He who suspected no one finds himself pinioned, as was my heart.
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