'Total Oblivion, More or Less' - Alan Deniro

[bookgazing]

This week Jeanne from the shiny new, Wordpress version of ‘Necromancy Never Pays’ and I will both be sharing some thought on Alan Deniro’s ‘Total Oblivion, More or Less’, a trippy young adult novel about the crumbling end of American society. Today Jeanne’s talking about Part One of the novel and answering some of my questions about the voice of the narrator Macy, while I’ll be chatting around some of her questions on the total weirdness of the novel.

Short version of the plot that runs through the first part of this novel: Minnesota, where Macy’s home is, has been invaded by horsemen, Scythians who want land and the Scythians have been combated by people called The Imperials. Macy guesses the Imperials are on the side of ordinary people, but nobody seems very clear. They start turning people out of their houses and instructed them to go to CAMP. Macy and her family are travelling downriver in a dystopian version of America, after escaping what has turned out to be a cross between a refugee and a prison camp. Along the way many a strange and sad thing happens; not everyone makes it to any sort of final destination.

If there’s one thing both Jeanne and I agree on, it’s that ‘Total Oblivion’ approaches a new level of literary weirdness for both of us. Deniro seems to have taken every strange image that floated into his mind while he was writing and committed them to paper. His novel includes a plethora of random details that never go anywhere significant, like Carl the giraffe who Macy’s brother buys on a whim, then just as quickly sells. I’d expect to see this kind of fun, but ultimately meaningless diversion, cut ruthlessly from a first novel to make it tighter, but these unimportant details actually form the basis of 'Total Oblivion'. It’s almost like Deniro pulled junk out of the back of his mind’s attic and balanced everything precariously to make one giant, unstable art installation and the placement of a giraffe in the pile comes to seem almost normal in contrast to the stuff that surrounds it (‘Is that dog eating a baby, just as it’s being born? Is that ship full of gladiators fighting for tourists entertainment? Sea cucumbers? Guns that sing? I think I would like to look just at the giraffe now dear, I understand giraffes.’ The novel’s whole world is crafted out of idea debris.

Which sounds very bad, doesn’t it? It sounds like I’m being critical, but somehow Alan Deniro turns debris into a certain kind of craft without ever allowing his novel to show that it’s making the least bit of effort at working to win the reader. Macy’s world is rebuilt is a short space of time and a new country wide craziness suddenly dictates how peoples lives go. Suddenly her entire life is pushed and pulled by a series of random occurrences. So it seems appropriate for this novel, where anything can happen at any moment and life can end so suddenly, to be filled with so many random, unexplained details. And ‘Total Oblivion’ somehow pulled me right into its story, so that I barely ever thought to quirk an eyebrow at its strangeness until I put it down.

There is a lot of weirdness for weirdness sake, for example in between Macy’s first person narrative there are excerpts from various source materials that narrate the history of this developing dystopia. Alternatively, some are vignettes that provide back story for members of Macy’s family. While some of these chapters are very effective at filling in gaps, or just providing interesting stories some, like one entitled ‘The Function of Dis-Ease, and How to Solve It’ are just plain out there. They don’t seem to serve a narrative purpose, but then looking for purpose and meaning in this novel is probably a mistake. Trying to analyse this book on symbolical terms has proved confusing and looking for coherent metaphors seems impossible. So maybe instead I should just be blunt and say that a few of these diversionary sections are dull. They don’t add to the fun or the sense of chaos of the novel, they don’t add to the narrative…They feel extraneous in a book that is built on the superfluous.

Even though I said the meaning behind the images in this book is hard to define there are threads of connection deep in the weirdness that suggest unifying themes. Macy’s father tells her a story about a man who saw the devil’s head in a diamond. Then when a man on board Macy’s ship catches the plague Macy sees images in his pustules, ‘a cathedral with a sun over it, the sun’s jagged rays falling on the cathedral’s roof; and a bird that mimicked his tattoo.’ Macy mentions her knowledge of weapons, gained from World of Warcraft several times and gaming seems to crop up occassionally. And the novel often makes satirical links between the forces of Scythians, Thracians and Imperials that seem instrumental in America’s break down and the European and American history of colonisation. If Deniro has a defining message that he wants to get across I can’t quite puzzle it out, but all the details and plot shrug along together narrated by Macy’s sardonic voice, creating an effect I’d call charming if there were a way to reconcile that word with the enthusiastically grizzly tone of some of the details (I quite enjoyed the originality behind some of the more intentionally disturbing moments).

Deniro’s unstructured weirdness feels familiar to me, but I can't place why. I've read a few weird fantasy books, but most of them are structured in their weirdness. The weirdness in most books feels like it has some kind of purpose and often feels like it's been placed strategically with the aim of achieving a particular effect (although some writers can go too far with that and the weirdness ends up feeling clunky and so obvious that it feels as if the book is jabbing you with a fork going 'look how kooky I am'). In 'Total Oblivion' the weird elements feel less tied together, more offcuts, sudden dawn inspirations that had to be written down before they disappeared. It's hard not to be enthusiastic about a writer who manages to blurt out such a sustained trail of originality, without detracting from the plot, or alienating readers.