POP – Splat

The characters are totally out of control. Everybody thinks they have the answers. Poor Horowitz is a lone voice that nobody hears. Typically. None have a shred of human dignity left in them. They are all in it for themselves – loose cannons on a trip to hell. A law unto themselves. An anarchy that seeks only one conclusion: death. This is the dark underbelly of the peculiarly South African psyche. Mechanistically bred by apartheid it now runs rampant in the ‘new’ South Africa. Cause and effect.

It is a monster that bedevils any attempt at our ability to grasp our collective humanity and call a truce.

It is also the insanity that we see in the Middle East, in America, in any crime riddled capital of the world, echoes of the Kebble hijacking…..I found this tale screamingly funny while being devastatingly tragic. This is because the characters are so perceptively and shrewdly accurate yet irreverently drawn. It becomes the literary equivalent of a cartoonists satirical notebook, page after page.

A front page article appeared in the daily paper while I was reading this book. It was about a man who was giving a farewell party in Durban North, because he was emigrating to Australia. Car-guards stormed the place, raped guests and took whatever they wanted. There was a shootout of sorts. I was shocked. The reporter described the events almost word for word to a scenario I had just read in this novel.

!t was an astonishing moment of deja vu.

Ian Martin has used Shakespeare’s Hamlet to create a trellis upon which he has constructed POP-splat: murder, intrigue, filial hatred, hijackings, student stupor, luxury, revenge, envy, back-stabbing. It is this framework that keeps the narrative grounded and the reader focused, for while the story runs riot, the reader knows the boundaries. Personally I found this psychologically rewarding, for it allowed me to follow the insanity, the intrigue of the events with the confidence of knowing that it could never spin out of control. The twists in the tale are inventive, unapologetically uncivil to the Bard (if this is even an issue) and infected with Martin’s sharp wit. The language is harsh and contemporary, almost staccato at times, so don’t expect POP-splat to be recommended for text book status.

Certainly not for the purists, it even invents sacred cows to burn (Philip Glass being one of them) just in case there is some ascetic searching for a redeeming message within the deconstructed and redefined narrative. And with a name like Ophabia, you just know this lady is going to fall apart.

Yet I found that because the tale is so desolate and irredeemable at any level, and which demands it as such, that this had a reverse psychological effect on me. And I found that refreshing.