fiction 'THE ULTIMATE ROAD NOVEL'
Laurie Clancy
Jack Dann
Bad Medicine
Flamingo $20.84 (incl. GST)pb, 305pp
0 7322 5954 1
Dann's protagonists are not wild young rebels but two ageing men (sexagenarians, naturally) whose lives have been largely ones of failure. Charlie Sarris was once a successful businessman. Now he has a burn-scarred face from an accident, no teeth, a drinking habit, a serious illness and a rotten job.
John Stone is an Indian medicine man, still highly respected by his people even after he too has taken to alcohol. When they meet in a cellar a certain antagonism develops before that gives way to friendship and Stone persuades the sceptical Charlie to accompany him on a 'vision-quest' which he describes as 'sort of an Indian bar mitzvah'. Dann's interest in Indians and their customs is genuine, as he explains in an Afterword to the novel but Stone is something of a white stereotype of an Indian, filled with spiritual belief in eagles as his talisman, carrying around his peace pipe, eating raw food and dog, even at his age a successful womaniser. His spiritual beliefs, no matter how rusty, are placed against Charlie's arid and self-pitying scepticism. But after the vision-quest goes wrong, Charlie finds out about John's heyoka, the mad, dark fits that come upon him.
After fighting with his family Charlie joins John in his madness and the two go on the road, smashing cars, stealing liquor, sleeping with women and making one final defiant declaration of their raging bull masculinity.
Dann writes with a highly self-conscious awareness of the mode in which he is working: 'Charlie didn't like going back into town. It was bad business. It was going home, and everybody knows you can't go home again.' Charlie is a less than charismatic figure, though he is authentic enough. His language is a succession of 'fuck the emphysema', 'Goddamn', 'Fucking Jew-bastards', 'godammit', 'crazy fucker', 'sonovabitch', realistic enough no doubt but making for a certain tonal monotony. He has a positive smorgasboard of racial prejudices yet a reluctant kind of emotional generosity as well.
John, on the other hand, suffers almost schizophrenic changes of mood, veering from serenity to near madness, as the heyoka seizes him. In one bizarre scene he robs a liquor store while dancing backwards, urinating on the bottles of liquor and attacking the store attendant before he suddenly changes; he begins healing the man's wound with an Indian remedy and offers him his necklace in a fair trade for the liquor. Though their own relationship is a troubled one and both have to battle with personal demons, at heart they're just Good Old Boys, out for a bit of fun.
In the end, all is resolved more or less satisfactorily and, improbably, in an almost upbeat way, with Charlie's little mistakes forgiven or forgotten. In accordance with the conventions of the genre the two men remain immune to the demands of the real world -- especially in the shape of the law, which is largely non-existent in the novel, and the possibility of being killed or injured by the numerous accidents they have, just as they consume monstrous amounts of alcohol without being seriously affected. At heart they're good guys; after they steal a cop car Charlie insists on throwing away the riot gun they find inside. That's what I call morals.
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Return to Australian Book Review /August 2000