12:01 AM
Vance Holmes
Black Juice by Margo Lanagan
Annotation:
Ten glimpses into the darkness of the human condition.
Recommendation:
Black Juice, by Margo Lanagan, is a disturbing and disturbingly difficult read. I have repeatedly forced myself back through the slog and slap of the book’s ten (mercifully) short stories, and yet they still remain foreign to me. I cannot fully determine the meaning or the mission of this phantasmic fiction. That isn’t to say Ms. Lanagan's writing is of low quality – but rather, that I am unable to read it.
The inability to read a text is a stark and humbling kind of horror. Along with feelings of personal inadequacy and shame, there is a sense of futility, and a frustration that prompts anger -- or potentially, hopelessness. If the author intended to evoke these negative emotions in young adults, then the writing proves successful. But then, it would mostly succeed at undermining the teenage reader by aiming at the central vulnerabilities of adolescence.
Assuming Lanagan's Black Juice was not intentionally cooked up as some sort of literary poison -- and further assuming that this wonder-starved fantasy fiction has been crafted to confound -- I'm left to wonder what could account for my own bizarre, emotional, and disturbing reaction to this material.
The inability to read a text is a stark and humbling kind of horror. Along with feelings of personal inadequacy and shame, there is a sense of futility, and a frustration that prompts anger -- or potentially, hopelessness. If the author intended to evoke these negative emotions in young adults, then the writing proves successful. But then, it would mostly succeed at undermining the teenage reader by aiming at the central vulnerabilities of adolescence.
Assuming Lanagan's Black Juice was not intentionally cooked up as some sort of literary poison -- and further assuming that this wonder-starved fantasy fiction has been crafted to confound -- I'm left to wonder what could account for my own bizarre, emotional, and disturbing reaction to this material.
Margo Lanagan is from Sydney, Australia; I'm from Pittsburgh. So perhaps the disconnect is cultural. The stories are filled with unusual phrases and word usages. Lanagan's language is possibly more familiar to Australian readers, but I have no way to map meanings or negotiate the logistics.
Not only is much of the lingo nearly incomprehensible to me, the general subject matter in Black Juice is sour and grim. The tone is never horrific or overly violent, but the atmosphere is consistently and thoroughly morose. Many of Lanagan's fantasy worlds project a harsh indifference. A number of the pieces have young protagonists, but beyond that, the arabesque opacity in Lanagan's narratives of damage, damnation and negligence simply do not belong to the culture of youth.
The experience of reading Black Juice is akin to walking into a very dark house and figuring out what’s there only when you trip or bump into something. The pleasure of recognition is undercut by the unpleasantness of the encounter. Ms. Lanagan's work frequently hints at an austere, brittle kind of beauty. Appreciating it however, demands an enormous amount of patience. The author is clearly a skilled language technician, so the requirement for patience is also likely a cultural matter.
Of the ten tales included in the book, three stand out: Singing My Sister Down, Red Nose Day and Sweet Pippit.
Of the ten tales included in the book, three stand out: Singing My Sister Down, Red Nose Day and Sweet Pippit.
Singing My Sister Down, is the first story in the collection. It concerns a woman forced to sink into a tar pit and die, presumably as punishment by the people of her town for some crime or community transgression. That is apparently what this story is about, but few details are supplied. The image of the woman sinking lower and lower into the tar is a fitting metaphor – in that it describes the experience of sinking down into a text that is incomprehensibly thick and dense. The story seems to contain some sense of cultural significance, but I lack the necessary cultural literacy.
Red Nose Day is easier to get through, but no less frustrating than Lanagan’s first story. Shy on particulars, Red Nose Day involves two assassins who have set about to kill a cabal of clowns. Why they have become clown serial killers is not examined. Reading between the lines, one can imagine that perhaps the clowns are criminals, though no such statements are directly made. We are given little information about the snipers or the clowns. As a result, we cannot much care. Some fantasy fiction has a "Twilight Zone" - type inner-logic that one can grab onto through careful reflection and receptivity to its symbology, but considering the senseless killings involved, Red Nose Day is not attractive enough to invite that level of contemplation.
Arguably the simplest piece is Sweet Pippit. At some point we grasp that the characters are talking elephants on a mission to find Pippit -- the much loved trainer from their zoo (or maybe circus?). Pippit was removed from the elephants for reasons never fully explained – to them or us. Again, the metaphor of animals searching seems to mock the reader’s hunt for answers. Once rescued, Pippit and the pachyderms continue searching – maybe for a new zoo (circus?). The reader is left searching back through the story for clues as to what any of it might signify.Based on what was found while stumbling about in the pitiless penumbra of this book, I plainly see only one thing: the humorless atmosphere, enigmatic prose, and harsh themes of the collection would not have wide adolescent appeal. It is not clear to me if Margo Lanagan has purposely used dense writing in order to make Black Juice difficult to comprehend, or if I am simply too dense to understand it. Either way, I found the book exhausting and unpleasant.
Nomination: No, as I am unable to read this book at the present time.
Genre Classification: Fantasy, Supernatural, Horror, Edgy, Printz Honor
Margo Lanagan interview
http://www.sfsite.com/09a/ml159.htm
Words of a Feather
House of Discarded Dreams
by Ekaterina Sedi
The Harlequin and the Train
by Paul G. Tremblay
Tender Morsels
by Margo Lanagan
White Time
by Margo Lanagan
Yellowcake
by Margo Lanagan
Posted in: RECOMMENDED READS
