Bookshelf

ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL

By Declan Burke

Liberties Press

 

FOR someone who has lived with, and suffered the consequences of, an over-active imagination all my life, I’m remarkably conservative when it comes to fantasy. I could never take to science fiction. Clever surreal plots leave me cold. Harry Potter is my idea of the seventh circle of hell.

I never had a problem riding home from the Sunday matinee on my imaginary horse and exterminating baddies I had just met on the big screen with my smoking finger gun. As I grew from boy to spotty adolescent I had no problem putting away such childish notions and concentrating on how I was going to sneak Raquel Welch upstairs past my mother — but I never went anywhere at warp factor seven or battled with warlocks. Star Trek left me cold. I couldn’t even get into the dream sequence in Dallas, the issue that divided the country more than the Treaty.

Up to recently, I was a confirmed realist. I liked to spend most of my time apart, but not divorced from reality.

So to my surprise last year when I came across Steve Earle’s (yes, Steve Earle of Galway Girl) I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, the story of a junkie doctor haunted by the ghost of Hank Williams in 1963 Texas, I was hooked from the start. Maybe my poor mind has overloaded on reality and is craving relief of any sort.

Santa obviously got wind of my enthusiastic ravings about this great book, because under the tree (admittedly an imaginary tree) this year was Absolute Zero Cool by Declan Burke, another book requiring suspended judgment.

The basic plot is this: the author is on a six-week stay at an artist’s retreat somewhere in Sligo when who turns up but a character from one of his abandoned novels, who is not very happy about being left in limbo.

The two agree on a co-operation pact and Billy Karlsson, the orphaned character, is back in business. Billy ‘is’ a hospital porter with a sideline in euthanasia and a grand plan to blow up the hospital where he works. Unfortunately, this is not enough to keep him occupied so he manoeuvres his way into the author’s work and the two need to iron out their artistic differences on a regular basis.

The author, I presume it’s Burke, is struggling with a deadline while Karlsson’s determined to write himself back into life. He also has an interest in Greek mythology and the two share a penchant for political cynicism. But who is the creator and who is the character? It’s all very noir — with an Irish twist.

The characters gelled so well that for the most part I simply forgot that Karlsson is not a ‘real’ person but a clever fictional instrument, like a credit default swap. In this pleasant state of suspended awareness I sat back and enjoyed the show.

While the plot device is clever, I derived most of my enjoyment from the running commentary on life, love and the pursuit of happiness in 21st century Ireland.

Ironically, fiction impinged on my own reality while in the process of reading Absolute Zero Cool. I came down with the mother of all infections over the Christmas but when a doctor suggested a trip to hospital, I baulked. No way, I told her, was I going into a place where I’d probably come out with a worse infection than I had when I went in. In my post-fever clarity, I see that Karlsson’s poor opinion of hospitals had seeped into my subconscious. If UHG is blown up in the next few days, consider this my confession.

While the character-coming-to-life device is clever enough, the real beauty of this book is the sharp dialogue, the witty vignettes and the well-sharpened digs. The running commentary on the state of the world is priceless. I’m reminded of my other great find of 2011, The  Eighty-Five Billion Euro  Man by Donal Conaty, which is political, or maybe economic satire at its very best. Sadly, it doesn’t need surreal plot devices to carry this story. It’s about our bailout, which of course defies surrealism.

Burke has a more eclectic approach and covers broader ground, but his delightfully jaundiced take on our current ‘reality’ could provide a political primer for any arriving alien unluckily enough to be beamed down here right now.

A fine example of this is his creation’s take on the Spartans. He points out that the ancient Greek civilisation bred for strength and kept the gene pool as pure as possible. Today, this primitive form of eugenics is regarded as a crime against humanity, although it’s working fine for racehorses, he points out.

He argues that society, by providing care for the weak, the very young and the very old, is sabotaging itself. We should be more like the Spartans and engage in regular culls to strengthen our stock.

“…In time, this will result in a shrinking core of healthy human beings, bounded on one side by ever-weakening youth, and on the other by indefinitely extended old age. The doctors and scientists are composing a suicide note to inform an indifferent universe that a species died out through caring too much. Compassion is without doubt A Good Thing, but too much of a A Good Thing is not a good thing. A surfeit of compassion becomes a disease. Hospitals become tumours.”

In case you’re worried that such notions might catch on in certain quarters, rest assured, there is a safety clause. Also included among those who society should dispose of are “non-contributors” and as the vast majority of the high-stool Himmlers I’ve ever come across certainly couldn’t be defined as contributors to anything more substantial than Diageo profit margins, we’re safe enough on that score.

He’s not too impressed on the bastardisation of democracy as currently practised either.

“For some reason most dictators fail to realise that the trick to democracy is to have the slaves buy and sell themselves. The trick is to incentivise slaves to invest in their slavery, to pay for their own prisons, shackle themselves to brick and mortar.”

There’s much more in this vein and meanwhile the plot to blow up the hospital progresses to its ultimate conclusion.

Absolute Zero Cool has finally convinced me that reality is over rated. Maybe if I’d discovered this earlier I could have got Raquel Welch up those stairs and past my mother. Maybe Raquel might even have taken off the wolf-pelt bikini top she wore in One Million Years BC for me? Anything is possible once we throw off the shackles of reality and let the imagination soar. Hang on, there’s a knock at the door…