2006 | start narrative here

The cover of the first volume of Simon Oliver and Tony Moore’s graphic novel series The Exterminators compares the publishing imprint Vertigo as the comic book version of television’s HBO. In that case, it’s easy to take this comparison even further and liken The Exterminators to Six Feet Under. Like Six Feet Under, The Exterminators takes an unlikely career path with a strong ick factor and uses it to look at issues of human relationships, conglomerate corporations versus independent business, life and death. However, everyone’s favourite undertaker family never had to battle an army of mutant cockroaches and a reincarnated Egyptian bug worshipper. I’m tempted to take this analogy further, but really there’s nowhere else to go with it. While Six Feet Under had the most perfect ending of any television show ever (in my completely biased and not often humble opinion), The Exterminators starts off strong but lacks momentum to bring it to a fully realized and effective ending.

Volume One: Bug Brothers (Simon Oliver & Tony Moore, 2006) introduces us to Henry James, a convicted criminal who, thanks to his step-father, has taken up the post-jail career of exterminator with Bug-Bee-Gone. Henry is learning the ropes of the vermin killing business with the very possibly deranged AJ. Exterminating is, and take this as a warning readers of a sensitive disposition, gruesomely portrayed. All the vermin are shown as vicious, drooling, diseased and the kill scenes are often full pages that bask in the glory of a successful kill. Only, these vermin aren’t completely innocent. The Bug-Bee-Gone researcher Saloth has discovered a new strain of cockroach that is not only resistant to the best roach poison, but fuelled by the very chemicals intended to kill it, mutated into something stronger and much more sinister than your average roach. The narrative in this first volume is set up so well, with every page come new possibilities and potentially intriguing side stories; such as the mysterious Saloth’s past connection to the Khmer Rouge, or Henry’s prison connection to the Aryan brotherhood, or Henry’s girlfriend Laura’s new job with Ocran – the makers of roach poison that doubles as a narcotic for humans brave enough to indulge Draxx, or the green scarab. All these little hints build anticipation for further volumes. The artwork is strangely beautiful, as though the world is being viewed through sunshine and a haze of pollution, lending it an almost otherworldly, though recognizable, murky hue.

Volume Two: Insurgency (Simon Oliver, Tony Moore, Ande Parks and Chris Samnee, 2007) continues with this narrative set up and builds on our knowledge of the characters. We’re introduced to a new love interest for Henry, Page – a literary hooker that works within the constraints of fulfilling sexual fantasies taken from literary works, proposed as a preferable option compared to the corporate career-minded Laura. An issue featuring complementary storylines that compare and contrast Page and Laura, after Laura and Henry have broken up, allows us to see the differences and similarities between them, but issues raised here are hugely contradicted by later storylines. Meanwhile, at Bug-Bee-Gone, the mutant cockroaches are infiltrating essential infrastructure and it is up to Kevin, Henry and Stretch to do the dirty work involved in clearing them out. The Exterminators really revels in the detritus of both humans and and plays on the base disgust we tend to have for bugs, rodents and vermin.

Volume Three: Lies of Our Fathers (Simon Oliver, Tony Moore, Mike Hawthorne and John Lucas, 2007) finally delves into Saloth’s back story as he fabricates his refugee past for a date. An encounter with a past comrade forces him to confront that past, and vows to never let it jeopardize his life’s work again. One of the most disturbing scenes in the series occurs in this volume, as a young boy who has just had his eyes operated on has consistent itching beneath his bandages. Just don’t expect there to be fully healed wounds and cheer beneath those bandages. Oh, and there’s another fantastically gross scene involving the resuscitation of a pet hamster. Despite some brilliantly disgusting moments, here is where the series really began to fall apart for me, as contradictions arise and problematic turns of events just aren’t as strong as those that preceeded them. Laura is set on a rape revenge path and viciously murders her boss – an image that contradicts completely with that we have of her crying to her mother and worrying about her career. And why is it that rape is used as a dramatic trope so often for female characters in graphic novels? It’s offensively reductive, and cheaply used as a convenient plot point. Though the plot twists are unpredictable and no character safe from death, it doesn’t feel like as cohesive, it seems directionless and as a reader, I lost trust in the storyline.

Volume Four: Crossfire and Collateral (Simon Oliver, Darick Robertson and Ty Templeton, 2008) features a really cool one issue story about Saloth and Stretch (the spiritual zen cowboy type who is also, if you’ll pardon a brief outburst of fangirlishness, really effing hot.) in a desert casino for a pest control convention, where more is revealed about Stretch’s shady past. This issue almost made me regain my faith in the story, but I’m thinking it was the combination of a story completely separate from the main narrative and artwork by Darick Robertson of Transmetropolitan fame that made me enjoy it so much. The rest of this volume focuses on a neighbourhood gang war over Draxx drug dealing, and the introduction of Draxx into black neighbourhoods by the Aryan brotherhood. This reads like an attempt to give The Exterminators more of a social slant, but I’m not entirely convinced. Too much of the dialogue and slang rely on painfully outdated stereotypes.

The final installment of the series, Volume Five: Bug Brothers Forever (Simon Oliver, Tony Moore, John Lucas and Ty Templeton, 2008), sees the epic showdown between bug and man that the series has been leading up to and … it’s disappointing. Again, some single story issues are entertainingly horrific, but the main narrative loses momentum as it draws to a close. The main issue is that the delineation between good and evil in The Exterminators is too convenient. The good guys – the Bug-Bee-Gones and associates – have their morally murky pasts and stories, but the bad guys are purely one dimensional. How can you create sympathy for a cockroach? It lacks the moral weight to make it truly engaging, and there never seems to be any doubt that the good guys are going to come out on top, albeit with significant losses. The final pages emphasize that this is just one battle won in a larger war of man against nature. More insight and exploration of the fascinating characters and less on the bug versus man battles would have made The Exterminators a triumph. As it is though, it’s a moderately entertaining graphic novel series that has hints of unfulfilled greatness.

Exchange by Paul Magrs (2006)

August 18, 2010 Book Reviews

1 comment

After weeks of reading Dennis Cooper, Joan Didion, introductory philosophy texts, I needed something to lighten the mood. I hadn’t heard a thing about Paul Magrs’ Exchange and only picked it up because of an intriguing cover, a collection of colourful letters smashing up against each other. Discovering that an exchange bookstore was a main feature of the novel was more than enough to entice me. However, for all the appropriately bibliophilic tendencies Exchange evokes, the main story is something of a disappointment, almost undoing all the joy to be found in the young character’s love of books.

Simon has moved to a small country town to live with his grandparents after the tragic death of his parents. Unusually unlike most other protagonists of young adult fiction, the still grieving Simon is quiet, awkward, self-conscious, without whipsmart comebacks to the taunts of the local lads. At first the heavy use of British slang – lots of lads and dafts – grated, but gradually faded in to the background. A fervent reader, Simon and his grandmother, Winnie, bond through a love of charity store book shopping and reading, a passion his surly grandfather doesn’t share.

The saving grace of the drab charity shops would be the inevitable shelves of paperbacks. This was the cheapest way to buy books, and he liked how they were jumbled together: ancient classics cheek by jowl with recent popular blockbusters; westerns and romances; fantasy and stark, searing realism. The erratic order of things exactly reflected his own reading habits and the almost random way he chose what would take up his attention next.

By chance, Simon and Winnie happen upon an exchange bookstore, manned by the artificially limbed (yes, really) Terrence and confident goth girl Kelly. Winnie discovers a book written by an old childhood friend about their lives growing up together and the narrative sometimes diverges into stories about Winnie and Ada’s past, leading up to a feelgood reunion. Simon too strikes up a friendship with Kelly, that borders on the romantic but due to Simon’s awkwardness is never quite able to move beyond friendship. Just as I was warming to the bibliophilia present in Exchange, enjoying long passages of the simple pleasures of reading and drinking tea, I stupidly read the back cover again which referred to “a terrible act of revenge.” Though it wasn’t evident in the style, story or structure itself, this knowledge filled me with a sense of dread. The story was so gentle, so peacefully quiet that I became anxious about what would happen to Simon and/or Winnie.

“Yes. It seems wrong, somehow, to get rid of books. You need them. They’ll remind you of who you are. And where you’ve been. And you’ll need them even more, when everything is changing…”

From there, and not just because of my rather unfounded dread, the story falls apart. Yet, I can’t really pinpoint exactly why. It could be that the story doesn’t particularly go anywhere, and there is no recognizable change or evolution within the characters. There seems to be the faint suggestion that reading is just a way of avoiding confrontation with real, abject feeling – whether grief, unhappiness or jealousy – which I do not agree with it. The final half of Exchange is uninteresting despite the interesting premise, and denies the pleasure that Simon, and surely the reader, takes in books and reading.

Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard (2006)

June 23, 2010 Book Reviews

2 comments

J.G. Ballard’s ideas and nightmarish vision of an all too possible future are often stronger than his characters or plotting. Usually, this would present a problem but as the concepts explored in Kingdom Come still seem so prescient, it is easy to forgive any comparatively minor faults of the narrative. When the novel opens up with a line as commanding as: “The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world” you are instantly aware of Ballard’s insight into the psychopathology of the suburbs, and what, under extreme circumstances, they could be capable of.

Richard Pearson is returning to the small town Brooklands where his father has been killed by a shooter on the rampage in a shopping centre, the Metro-Centre. As he uneasily descends from London into the outer towns, he sees their culture represented by symbols of consumerism rather than community – no history, no tradition – in part created by advertisers like himself. There are hints of a nationalism in the display of St. George flags, a pride that becomes more dangerous and unsettling as he witnesses Muslim families being evicted from their homes without protest. Arriving in Brooklands, he is unconvinced by the release of the suspected shooter and the witness statements from local authority figures. As he delves deeper into the mystery surrounding his father’s death, he uncovers a local fervour for consumerism and the Metro-Centre that borders on the neo-fascist. Vicious attacks of street violence against minority communities are seemingly orchestrated by prominent authority figures, and Richard is unsure who to trust and the motives of these people, yet determined to discover the truth about his father’s mysterious death.

Consumerism is the greatest device anyone has invented for controlling people. New fantasies, new dreams and dislikes, new souls to heal. For some peculiar reason, they call it shopping. But it’s really the purest kind of politics.

The characters, other than Richard, do seem to blur together. They appear as mere mouthpieces for Ballard’s ideas about the links between consumerism and fascism, Richard is involved in long conversations about the state of society – yet somehow, they work to get Ballard’s point across. Perhaps the narrative itself is also tentatively built around these ideas, but it captures the basic concepts in a way that makes them recognizable and relevant. As Richard befriends the local cable channel figurehead, David Cruise, he begins to use him to express his own ideas about leadership through subtle masochism of the masses. It is here, though Richard refuses to acknowledge his part in it, that the feverish love for the Metro-Centre truly turns primal, even totemistic. What is at heart a social experiment for an advertiser becomes a fascist state driven by consumerism, emotion and violence. Richard seems surprised that his messages of irony have been taken seriously as slogans for a political movement, but he himself was aware of the unquestioning devotion of the Metro-Centre shoppers.

‘Why not? We’re totally degenerate. We lack spine, and any faith in ourselves. We have a tabloid world-view, but no dreams or ideals. We have to be teased with the promise of deviant sex. [...] We’re worth nothing, but we worship our barcodes. We’re the most advanced society our planet has ever seen, but real decadence is far out of our reach. We’re so desperate we have to rely on people like you to spin a new set of fairy tales, cosy little fantasies of alienation and guilt [...]‘

After an attempted assassination attempt on David Cruise’s life, the supporters, authorities and Richard are barracaded in the Metro-Centre for months. Trapped in the revered centre, the religious instinct takes over the shoppers: altars to the sick and the dying, no looting of the worshipped consumer goods, an unofficial power structure begins to establish and finally destroy itself. This section is much shorter compared to the build up, more time spent locked inside the Metro-Centre could have heightened the anxiety, and the inescapable violence.

Despite the possibly intentional blankness of the characters, Ballard extrapolates upon a consumerist culture to create a bleak image of the future that is frighteningly possible, using the motifs and messages we are all familiar with and turning them into something unsettling and disturbing. For a novel written in 2006 Kingdom Come is conspicuously lacking any reference to internet or surveillance technology, though the damning condemnation of our buy any/every thing culture remains startlingly relevant.

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green (2006)

March 8, 2010 Book Reviews

3 comments

John Green‘s second novel An Abundance of Katherines again relies on the trope of feisty female as the emotional saviour of a socially awkward young male, yet manages to be an inviting, and very funny, look at teenage relationships and friendships. After being dumped by his nineteenth girlfriend named Katherine, child prodigy Colin Singleton sets of on a cross-country road trip with his best friend Hassan in order to clear his mind and work on a mathematic formula which predicts the rate of relationship failure. Colin does come up with his desired formula, but more importantly, learns along the way, with a little help from a smart and sassy young woman named Lindsey, that the unpredictably best parts of life cannot be measured. Despite An Abundance of Katherines following a very similar track as Green’s previous novel, there is enough quirky characters and genuine humour and warmth to distinguish it in its own right.

“May I be excused for a moment?” he asked.
“Is it important?”
“I think I have an eyelash in my pupillary sphincter,” replied Colin and the class erupted into laughter. Ms. Sorenstein sent him on his way, and then Colin went into the bathroom and, staring at the mirror, plucked the eyelash from his eye, where the pupillary sphincter is located.
After class, Hassan found Colin eating a peanut butter and no jelly sandwich on the wide stone staircase at the school’s back entrance.
“Look,” Hassan said. “This is my ninth day at a school in my entire life, and yet somehow I have already grasped what you can and cannot say. And you cannot say anything about your own sphincter.”
“It’s part of your eye,” Colin said defensively. “I was being clever.”
“Listen, dude. You gotta know your audience. That bit would kill at an ophthalmologist convention, but in calculus class, everybody’s just wondering how the hell you got an eyelash there.”
And so they were friends.

Socially awkward and intellectually gifted, Colin Singleton is broken up over his most recent break-up with Katherine #19. (I’ve tried not to over think how such a socially inept young man has managed to charm nineteen Katherines, when he is completely and utterly devoid of social skills.) His best friend, the hilarious Hassan, takes him on a cross-country road trip to heal his wounds, landing finally in Gutshot, Tennessee via a visit to the grave of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. There they meet Lindsey Lee Wells and decide to stop in Gutshot working for her mother. Bonding with Lindsey and her friends, and working on his formula to predict the outcomes of his Katherine relationships, Colin learns a little about himself, and a lot about life.

The reading quieted his brain a little. Without Katherine and without the Theorem and without his hopes of mattering, he had very little. But he always had books. Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.

My main issue with Looking for Alaska [review] was the use of Alaska as a narrative device rather than a fully fleshed out character; her motivations are hidden, but only to be uncovered by our sleuthing protagonist. In An Abundance of Katherines, the female romantic lead, Lindsey, forms a more genuine connection with Colin without the manic mood swings or mysterious air, before exploring their relationship further. Though Colin does come to see the unpredictability of life as a grand pleasure through Lindsey’s influence, it seems to shift based on more a shared experience – they both overcome heartache and find each other, and happiness, despite of it.

An Abundance of Katherines is full of random trivial tidbits and a number of seemingly insignificant subplots, all of which somehow manage to strengthen a reader’s perception of the story and the characters. The friendship between Hassan and Colin is very funny, a pair of more unlikely friends you could not imagine, but their sincere affection and friendly vernacular are so endearing. Even if his use of female characters is a little problematic, John Green knows how to write about close friendships and An Abundance of Katherines is a clever and amusing look at the complexity of friendships, relationships and our own understanding of life.

Paint It Black by Janet Fitch (2006)

August 27, 2009 Book Reviews

No comments

Paint It Black: Josie Tyrell, white trash, artist’s model, teen runaway and denizen of LA’s 1980 punk rock scene, finds a chance at real love with art student Michael Faraday. A Harvard dropout and son of a renowned pianist, Michael introduces her to a world of sophistication, and to his own artistic quest for beauty. But when she receives a call from the Los Angeles County Coroner asking her to identify her lover’s dead body, her bright dreams fade to black. As Josie struggles to come to some new understanding of the Michael she thought she knew, she finds herself drawn into a dark and twisted relationship with his mother, Meredith. In mutual distrust and blind need they circle one another – their very survival and memory of Michael is at stake.

I will start this review with the inevitable mention of Janet Fitch’s White Oleander. I haven’t reread it in its entirety since I first read it as a teenager, but it was a book that blew me away with staggeringly beautiful writing. Maybe a touch melodramatic, but that hint of ethereal unreality made it a twisted mother-daughter nightmare. Astrid and Ingrid were otherworldly spirits whose tragedies and triumphs spoke deeply. I really liked that book – but as I said, I haven’t reread it for a long time and am not sure how I would read it now – and I am undoubtedly going to compare Paint It Black to White Oleander. The comparison is splashed over the cover, it practically begs it. Unfair as it may be. Each work to stand on its own merits. Fitch set herself an impossibly high standard with White Oleander.

Paint It Black is the story of Josie, punked-out model trash living on vodka and French cigarettes, and how she copes with the aftermath the suicide of her impossibly brilliant lover Michael. Michael’s famous mother, gifted pianist Meredith Loewy, and Josie share a destructive antagonistic relationship as they both attempt to come to terms with their jealousy, confusion and loss.

The first half of the novel is soaked in Josie’s adolescent musing. It does not have the depth or poetic intensity of White Oleander, it is more reminiscent of a lesser Francesca Lia Block novel, focusing as it does on Josie’s girlish laments on love and loss in Los Angeles. The idyllic conditions of Josie and Michael’s bohemian cottage is similar to the dream-world occupied by the characters of the Weetzie Bat series. Once Meredith and Michael are introduced into the story, and their backstory slowly revealed, you can’t help but feel that Fitch has chosen to focus on the least interesting character. While all the characters are deeply flawed, Josie seems to have little comprehension of her self and her situation. She fails to understand, repeatedly. She is lost, she is confused. Self-centred and often frustrating. Despite all this, all an understandable response to the situation she has found herself in, she is not unlikeable.

The novel descends into a Sunset Boulevard noirish trap, in which the two female characters find themselves struggling together and against each other in Meredith’s stately family home. As Josie uncovers more about Michael and his past, she comes to a greater understanding not only of herself, but of the world at large. Her devoutly visceral and physical presense – she maintains a sense of herself through her body, despite all the emotional and physical trauma she goes through – “just a body” allows her to hide the gradual evolution of her emotional self. She matures as a result of what she experiences and discovers, and it is a journey which unfolds gently, slowly, realistically. The character development here is delicately nuanced in a way I haven’t experienced in a while.

Paint It Black does not have the instant hypnotic effect of White Oleander, but it is a gritty portrait of grief and loss told with Fitch’s signature descriptive style.

The Exterminators by Simon Oliver and Tony Moore (2006-2008)

Exchange by Paul Magrs (2006)

Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard (2006)

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green (2006)

Paint It Black by Janet Fitch (2006)

Start Narrative Here

Pages