| Product: |
Not the End of the World - Christopher Brookmyre |
| Date: |
21/09/06 (114 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Full on, all guns blazing attack on evangelicalism
Disadvantages: Daft plot, poor characters, bad ending
Christopher Brookmyre is probably one of Britains most popular crime writers. Someone described his writing as 'Tartan Noir' once. Personally I don't think that fits at all, but his publisher's marketing people clearly liked it, as the quote has adorned the cover of practically every one of his books since. His novels tend to be irreverent, funny, fast-paced, and acerbic. He delights in taking pot shots at various elements of modern culture. His favourite targets are the press, politicians, middle class hypocrisy, and religion. Here he takes aim at one of the biggest targets of them all, American fundamentalist evangelicalism, and he really gives it both barrels. Then reloads, and does so again. Then frenziedly beats the remains to a pulp with the stock.
Unlike most of Brookmyre's books, Not the End of the World is not set in Scotland. Instead the scene is the modern day Gomorrah that is Los Angeles. The year is 1999, and the air is thick with pre-millennium tension. A nice police officer called Larry, returning to work following a recent personal tragedy, and a big Scottish photographer called Steff, end up embroiled in a fine old mess involving televangelists, religious fanatics, porn stars, Hollywood sleaze merchants, and bombs of various sizes.
Larry is made the LAPD security liaison to a hotel-based convention of cheap and cheerful Hollywood B and C movie producers - film-makers who specialise in the kind of direct to video fare that end up for sale in supermarket bargain buckets and garden centres (Why do garden centres even sell videos? And, given that they do, why such bad ones?). This is supposed to be an easy job to ease him back into police work after the death of his infant son, but, alas, a televangelist and his flock of brainwashed devotees set up camp on the other side of the hotel's car park, and the mix of right wing Christianity and the worst of Hollywood's libertine excess turns out to be explosive.
Meanwhile, Steff, a nice Glasweigan photographer, in town to take snaps of the acting 'talent' on display at the film convention, finds himself falling for a former porn startlet turned serious actress. The path of true love, however, is rendered uneven, not to say rocky, by the intervention of religious mania in the form of a crazed bomber who, describing her as the 'whore of Babylon' demands that she kill herself on live television, or he'll blow up a boat full of people.
At the same time, a mystery develops concerning a boat, adrift in the ocean, seemingly abandoned, which once contained four seismologists and a submarine. Were the crew of this modern-day Mary Celeste the victims of a simple accident, or was their disappearance a part of some awesome and malign plan?
I always find Christopher Brookmyre's books easy to read. That's not necessarily much of a recommendation, but it's a sign that the author must be doing something right, and this is no exception. I polished it off in a couple of evenings. I usually find him pretty funny, as well. Not laugh out loud funny, but usually wry smile funny when he skewers some readily identifiable everyday pretension or hypocrisy with a particularly clever phrase or paragraph. And again, There's plenty of that sly humour here. But, while this story contains plenty of the elements that I like about his writing, I found it, as a whole, the least satisfying of his books that I have read.
First off, some of the leading characters are desperately underwritten. It's a shame, as his characterisation can be pretty good. Characters like Maddy, the senator's daughter and one-time porn star, for example, are explored in depth and evoke belief and sympathy. Larry, on the other hand, is defined only by honesty, decency, and a recent personal tragedy. That's about it. And I suspect the recent personal tragedy was only chucked in to give Larry cause to reflect on his religious beliefs. It certainly doesn't seem to have any bearing on the story. Given that he's a major protagonist, neglecting to flesh him out properly is damaging to the story.
The problem here is that the book is entirely focussed on demolishing Christian fundamentalism. As such all the characters are sledgehammers Brookmyre has fashioned to hit evangelicals with. The characters we’re supposed to root for are all godless but good. All the monsters in the book are the twisted results of religious repression. Evangelists are cynical manipulators and their flocks are wide eyed idiots. The character’s personalities are basically defined by their attitudes to religion, so it's probably not surprising they don't come alive all that well. Indeed it makes it surprising that any of them do at all. As I said, I thought Maddy was pretty good, all told, and I also found the exploration of the chief televangelist's appalling upbringing compelling - although that good work was undermined when Brookmyre cynically pulled the rug out from under the character at the end.
When it comes to the plot, Brookmyre has, in moving the action from grim and grimy Scotland to bright and shiny Los Angeles, ditched the grubby, low-key criminality that typifies the Jack Parlabane novels, in favour of the “everything to excess” ethos of the Hollywood blockbuster. Unfortunately he goes way too far, in my opinion. The deranged bomber, particularly with the lurid twist of his demand for a human sacrifice to sate the blood lust of his old testament God, would have been all right on its own, but the wider, earth shaking conspiracy that is going on contemporaneously is just ludicrous. I don't know if Brookmyre's trying to be funny, or ironic, or if he's just plain misguided, but it really doesn't work for me.
And the prose! My word. He’s never had much in common with Jane Austen, but, while I don’t object to bad language and the odd off colour simile, I can’t help feeling that the likes of ‘his pupils contracted like an a***hole in a prison shower’ are a step too far. Again, “everything to excess”, and I’m sure some would find the above funny, but to me it just grates when a decent writer allows himself to be so juvenile and crass.
Overwhelmingly the thing that stops this book from working is the author’s determination to cast stone after stone at right wing American bible bashers. Now, I have very little sympathy for religious fundamentalists of any stripe, I think they’re wrong headed and scary at best. I’m one of those who like to imagine all the people living for today (ooh hooh). But, while I sympathise with Brookmyre’s desire to knock some sense into the divinely addled, a crime novel written with a blockbuster insensibility that’s also trying to be funny isn’t really a very good tool to do it with (at less than four hundred pages, it’s not really heavy enough, for a start – particularly when your antagonists are going to be hitting you back with leather-bound bibles).
The author scores some hits, certainly. The description of the faithful at the evangelist conference is genuinely amusing, particularly the Christian rock band. And the carnival of hypocrisy that surrounds the mad bomber and Maddy’s sacrifice provides scope for some of the razor sharp satire at which Brookmyre excels. And the sensitive way in which he handles Maddy’s past and her motivations for adopting her most frowned upon of career choices does reinforce the point: who are we to judge? But, even as he bends over backwards to explain why she agreed to bend over backwards on camera, one can’t quite forget that, while for one person participating in hard core porn might be a step on the road to psychological recovery from horrendous emotional childhood trauma, for most it’s something else entirely.
Of course, reaching out to the benighted faithful and bringing them into the light of reason was never really his agenda, as the big thing about evangelicals is they tend not to be open to theological discourse, being too busy trying to stop people in Africa wearing condoms. Brookmyre, understanding that, and frustrated by it, is not interested in engaging with them at all. He’s more about shouting at the top of his voice “OI! EVENGELICALS! YOU’RE ALL MAD AND DANGEROUS AND I WANT YOU TO STOP TRYING TO IMPOSE YOUR OUTDATED MORAL AND SPIRITUAL BELIEFS ON THE REST OF US!”
Unfortunately, the result of the author's mixed desire to rant and to entertain at the same time is an overblown mess of a book, which, while it certainly does no favours to its intended target, reflects pretty badly on the author as well. I am reminded of the Dilbertism “Never argue with an idiot. They’ll just drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.” By launching an all out attack on a viewpoint he doesn’t like, Brookmyre has ended up doing exactly what he wishes others wouldn’t do, and the result is a book that fails to convince in terms of plot and in terms of character, while also failing to win the argument.
Summary: An antitheistic rant disguised as a satirical thriller
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