Paul Bryant's Reviews > High Life

“Roll up, roll up, step right this way” – hey, it’s that guy again! He keeps turning up in my reviews – he’s played by Tom Waits in a bowler hat – (memo to finance department - please don't squander your entire budget hiring cool singer/songwriter/actors to do bit parts in these reviews, I hope they can stand up on their own without such indulgencies) - anyway, what's he saying this time?

“It’s a continuous show, you pays your money and you takes just as long as you likes inside, yes sir! We have everything for the connoisseur IF you know what I mean, I’m saying we don’t just have LIVE! NUDE! GIRLS! oh no, oh no, not at all, we have FOR your DELECTATION and your EDIFICATION we have at no expense spared ALL THE MAJOR PARAPHILIAS yes sir, right inside, right up there BANG smack on stage, in floodlights, and a few in some private booths for a modest extra fee – Here you look like a man of the world, a l’homme du monde as they say in Italy, you there –“

“Who, me?”

“Yes sir, you appear to me like a guy with an interest in things, if you catch my drift – I can see it in your expression, in the tilt of your trilby, that pique of curiosity – step right inside, that’s it, just twenty reasonable dollars, that’s let’s say fifteen of your English pounds, all major credit cards accepted, thank you, thank you sir, here’s the door, it’s a show you won’t forget…”


DIGRESSION ABOUT REALISM


Is fiction realistic? Another question : is fiction supposed to be realistic? Let’s imagine a sliding scale. Over here, on the extreme left, we have Lord of the Rings. Over there, on the far right, we have The Executioner’s Song. We can spread everything else out between these two poles. So what about genre fiction? That deals in agreed conventions, covenants between the author and the reader – in thrillers it will be like this (guns and gals and gore), in science fiction it will be like that (aliens and time travel and hardly any gals). Within genres, you get another sliding scale – in science fiction, for instance, between the long range abstractions of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series on the left hand, all the way over to Kim Stanley Robinson’s meticulous terraforming books about Mars. In the detective story/murder mystery genre, the scale would be from Lord Peter Wimsey and Miss Marple on this side (no, that’s not how England EVER WAS) and all the way over to Richard Price’s forensically detailed procedurals Freedomland and Lush Life.

THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE!

This novel, High Life, is a genre exercise in "California noir", and comes at you like the younger snottier filthier even more nihilistic son of James Ellroy – a Trainspotting/Ellroy/Chandler mashup, almost. As such, that’s not a bad ambition. Unfortunately, High Life is a fairly lame way to do it.

One of the reasons why I’d quite like to live to be 200 years old is to find out what they’ll have left to gross each other out with in future decades. There are so many extreme films and books being produced in this line that we are surely now unshockable - I would have thought. Matthew Stokoe appears to have taken on the challenge of finding ways to shock and disturb even us terribly jaded types.

However I thought I'd rewrite this review and remove my previous description of Mr Stokoe's filthiness in an attempt to get an R rating and avoid the previous NC-17. But I'll give you a hint. In Mr Stokoe's view, there is definitely sex after death.

So there's that, and a stupid plot, and then there’s Mr Stokoe’s horrible stock characters, the main two of which are

- the bent copper who says stuff like

Now you wouldn’t wanna piss me off on such a nice day as this, would you, Jackie boy

I’m going to find out sooner or later so you may as well spare yourself some grief

with variations about a jillion times between pages 50 and 250 as he blackmails his way into Jack’s life. This kind of dialogue was much groaned at and mocked by viewers of The Sweeney, a British cop show, back in the 1970s.

and then (oh no, oh yes)

- the femme fatale, rich, beautiful, sexually voracious, any time, any where.

Mr Stokoe actually gets a whole lot of background detail and Los Angeles scene setting really spot on, with many nice touches which I enjoyed, but these characters, my God! They're all from the Planet dahmer.

And the plot is same old everything-points-to-this-person-being-the-killer-but-it’s-that-person-really. Surprise! Not!!

Then again, I finished it, I didn’t hurl it. Can't be denied, Matthew Stokoe has a kind of horrible unpleasant talent. This was the follow-up to Cows (also reviewed) which was not a genre exercise and was much more lunatic. I enjoyed that one a great deal more. It was about cows!



Mooo!