The synopsis on the back of
The Infernal, the debut novel of Mark Doten, does absolutely nothing to warn
you of the craziness of the novel he has written a kind of brutal, precise
dissection of the War on Terror that is vague and frightening and within a few
feet of brilliance. Reading it, you can’t help but think of the books that it
is trying to be like, being less of a war book like Kevin Powers’ The Yellow
Birds or Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and sharing more of
its DNA with Mark Z. Danielewski. But reading it, and the emotions I got from
it, a kind of well-earned frustration with the sinking feeling that the world
as I know it is crumbling page by page, I couldn’t help but think of Blake
Butler’s nightmarish 300,000,000, a book I read earlier this year. While this
book is not as scary as that one, the quality of narrative is. What begins as a
simple interrogation of a wounded boy in the Iraq desert turns ghoulish with
world-wide menace that also, as I write this, reminds me a little of David
Mitchell. Hooked up to a machine called The Omnosyne, which is described as a
kind of torture device, whether intentionally or not, he broadcasts the inner
thoughts of many of the War on Terror’s players. In this weird world, Osama Bin
Laden is vampire-like figure that feeds off the blood of Jewish boys; Donald
Rumsfield and Condoleezza Rice have a dark history, and a wounded veteran,
adjusting to civilian life, is having murderous visions that terrify him. It gets
confusing, and that’s an understatement, keeping many details cloaked in unreliable
narrators and narrative threads that are frayed. But it that is the point of
the novel, it does so very well, and I walked away from this novel exhausted,
but with a reluctant admiration for story that went to great lengths to make me
think differently than I normally do.
Rating: 4/5
No comments:
Post a Comment