Losing all hope is freedom (The Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk)

Member Name: TJ-Mackey

Product:	The Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Date:	29/10/00 (401 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Dark humour, interesting story & structure, easy to read.

Disadvantages: No different to the film, a bit short.

From the intriguing opening, where the narrator describes a gun being pushed into his mouth while he stands atop a building rigged with explosives, Fight Club draws the reader in and then keeps them reading. Starting a novel near the end of the story isn’t an original idea, in fact it’s probably been done to death, but it is testament to Chuck Palahniuk’s simple yet curious writing style that the book has become so successful. Of course, the recent release of the film version probably didn’t harm the book’s sales either!

After a few pages of this opening scene, where it appears the narrator will die either from being shot by the mysterious Tyler Durden or being blown up by an organisation known as Project Mayhem, we are taken back several months to explain how this situation was reached. Written in first person narrative, we are introduced to the world in which the narrator lives; where your life is determined by what you own, and the only release of emotion you can experience is by visiting cancer support groups. That is, until a chance meeting with soap salesman Tyler Durden leads to the formation of an underground 'fight club', where young men can rid themselves of their frustration through violence.

Starting in the cellar of just one bar, fight club spreads like wildfire, until it becomes a nationwide culture with fight clubs in every city in America, but no one speaks about it, because the first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club. There are several other rules, which you’ll find out by reading the book. What is clear though is that there’s a hidden agenda behind the enigmatic Tyler’s plans, but the exact nature of this is uncertain.

As I see it, Fight Club is a biting look at the consumer society that exist today, where you are judged on what clothes you wear, what household appliances you own, and what job you have, rather than the person you are. After
the narrator’s high-rise apartment is destroyed while away on business, all he is left with is a suitcase of clothes and the offer of a place to live in Tyler’s rundown house. From that point on, his life continues in a downward spiral until he wonders if he’ll ever reach rock bottom.

From this description, you might think Fight Club is a very depressing story. In fact, at times it’s very funny, in an extremely dark way. You can’t help but laugh at the pure hopelessness of the characters and the situations they find themselves in, and much of the narrative is bleakly humorous. However, there is also a disturbing nature to the story, in that even by being the creator of something, you might not necessarily be able to control it. As the story progresses, it seems both fight club and Tyler Durden could easily overwhelm the narrator’s life in ways he couldn’t even imagine.

Having seen the film version before reading the book, I was expecting to see something slightly different here. However, the film has remained remarkably faithful to the original novel, and thus essentially tells the same story. Despite this, I still couldn’t put the book down at times, and I think this owes as much to the simple and easy-to-read structure as to the gripping story. The book is only about 200 pages long, and the typeface is quite large and devoid of long descriptive passages, therefore making it a very easy read. Having said that, Palahniuk still manages to get the message across, primarily through the insightful and interesting monologues given by the narrator.

If you’ve already seen the film, you won’t really find anything new here, but if you liked watching it, you’ll probably find it interesting to read the original novel it was based upon. I do think it’s slightly over-rated, now having achieved an almost cult status, but I did like reading it and would definitely recommend it to oth
ers. Don’t expect a masterpiece, but keep an open mind and I’m sure you’ll enjoy this book as much as I did.

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