Hedonism Book

A Dalkey, understated even by Dalkey standards. Who is Reyoung? How can there be nothing out there on this man? Complete blackout, true 'man of mystery'. 'Unbabbling' also debuted without fanfare in 1997: unassuming, unpromoted, and frankly unread. A real shame.

The novel is arranged in three 'silos' : standalone stories loosely seamed together through the narrative consciousness of Harry, who morphs into new personas whilst preserving the Harry moniker as a signifier of a macabre continuity.

I read the first part 'Unbabbling', and skimmed through the rest before setting it aside: nothing to do with quirkiness of this gem and everything to do with my own idiosyncrasies: I don't do trilogies in one book at the same time. (Tourettes, you know).

Set in some indeterminate future, and unspecified town (so vaguely alluded to I didn't realise it until the story was almost over: I thought it was happening in NYC), protag Harry seems to have been plucked from the heart of Bukowski's oeuvre, fleshed out to 'Roman' proportions and loosed in 3D: a Pinnochio 'unbabbled'.

Harry is a vet, suffering from shell shock, immersed in a haze of booze and drugs, plagued by war terrors, sweating it out in a stone quarry by day and meshing with 'his people' at night: the underbelly of society, the salt n' pepper miscreants whose unheard lament echoes across the battlefields of American wars (well its true, isn't it? I don't think the American soldier on the ground is a senator's son, now, is he?). And, he hates himself, and life of course is meaningless.
The problem of course in situations like these is that if you hate yourself, you have trouble believing anyone else could possibly love you. Therefore, they must all have nefarious purposes: they must be out to get you. And with this philosophy in mind, Harry undergoes a Mephistophelean metamorphosis whilst fucking over his wife and kid.(E.g. rises up the corporate ladder, makes a load of money, starts sleeping with his boss: the usual deal). Needless to say, happiness remains an unattained illusion whilst the death of soul, if not body, count around him rises. Mephistopheles with a Medusa touch: everyone he turns his hand to withers and shrivels to husk.

Its not a unique story by any means. What wins me over is the raw, unpurified anger, the electrifying intensity of emotion, prose, purpose and praxis of anguish. A pancea of pain and helpless rage ooze like treacle off the page, and Reyoung hovers somewhere in the wings, holding an electric cattle prod, which he periodically brandishes with unbridled relish straight into my neural network, so that I'm unbabbled right alongside Harry, in tandem.