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A review by richaudayana
Damned by Chuck Palahniuk
2.0
The best thing – usually – about reading Chuck Palahniuk is that brief insight he offers you into his chaotic, hyper-imaginative brain. Survivor, Fight Club, Choke and Lullaby, among others, felt like good books because I was a little altered by the time I finished reading them. Of course, this is the selfish reader in me talking. I might be able to appreciate the literary tone, etc, of a book as an entirely separate manner; I just don’t know what to do after I’ve finished reading a well-written volume that just doesn’t... do anything for me.
(Sort of what Audrey Niffeneger’s ‘Her fearful symmetry’ does to you after you consume it greedily in the hopes of finding something as beautiful as ‘The time-traveller’s wife’)
‘Damned’ starts off disappointingly.
The protagonist, Madison, all of 13 years of age, feels unreal, plastic, too-verbose-to-be-true (even in a first-person account book, yes). Right at the beginning, she finds herself in hell. And it’s an interesting hell, incorporative of many historical civilisations’ demons and mythologies. And so we run along with Japanese demons of storms, Macedonian demons, Egyptian ones, and so forth.
Maddy, as we’ll call her, begins each chapter with a little note to Satan, seeking him out, before launching into her enterprising adventures in hell and giving us a brief look into her disgustingly affluent and disturbing brief life as a living girl.
Palahniuk stays true to form throughout: mocking and dismissive of material wealth, challenging sexual boundaries and interestingly, weaving in a certain amount of metaphor into the book. Even if he doesn’t, the patterns are amusing as towards the end, hell emerges as a long-ignored, man-made catastrophe-struck landscape – an almost-futuristic world drowning in discarded semen, sweat and tears, candy, mucosa, nail clippings and aborted, half-formed foetuses.
A good part of the book is dedicated to creating this parallel and he builds it with descriptions of men and women reduced to shadows of themselves, in despair because of where they are, of the stink and presence of human excreta every which way, of bureaucracy and red-tapism even in the corridors of power in hell. He derides ‘environmentalists’ and do-gooders, he mocks the people one would ordinarily adulate, celebrities and God, and he does this in crisp, beautiful writing.
But that’s where the good things end.
The story does improve slightly before the mid-way mark with what I’ll call classic Palahniuk-isms – a daemon goddess orgasming in the middle of chomping off a teen’s head (not due to the chomping, I should add. But no more spoilers), the re-death (?) of Hitler and several other tyrants across history who have been languishing in hell so far, and a rather fine collection of scatological incidents. Maddy’s character makes several attempts at being richer, deeper and more interesting. And fails.
Predictably, ‘Damned’ ends with a whimper and promise which made me sadder than having read it: to be continued.
PS. I think the sequel is called Doomed. I’m not sure how I feel about that just yet.
(Sort of what Audrey Niffeneger’s ‘Her fearful symmetry’ does to you after you consume it greedily in the hopes of finding something as beautiful as ‘The time-traveller’s wife’)
‘Damned’ starts off disappointingly.
The protagonist, Madison, all of 13 years of age, feels unreal, plastic, too-verbose-to-be-true (even in a first-person account book, yes). Right at the beginning, she finds herself in hell. And it’s an interesting hell, incorporative of many historical civilisations’ demons and mythologies. And so we run along with Japanese demons of storms, Macedonian demons, Egyptian ones, and so forth.
Maddy, as we’ll call her, begins each chapter with a little note to Satan, seeking him out, before launching into her enterprising adventures in hell and giving us a brief look into her disgustingly affluent and disturbing brief life as a living girl.
Palahniuk stays true to form throughout: mocking and dismissive of material wealth, challenging sexual boundaries and interestingly, weaving in a certain amount of metaphor into the book. Even if he doesn’t, the patterns are amusing as towards the end, hell emerges as a long-ignored, man-made catastrophe-struck landscape – an almost-futuristic world drowning in discarded semen, sweat and tears, candy, mucosa, nail clippings and aborted, half-formed foetuses.
A good part of the book is dedicated to creating this parallel and he builds it with descriptions of men and women reduced to shadows of themselves, in despair because of where they are, of the stink and presence of human excreta every which way, of bureaucracy and red-tapism even in the corridors of power in hell. He derides ‘environmentalists’ and do-gooders, he mocks the people one would ordinarily adulate, celebrities and God, and he does this in crisp, beautiful writing.
But that’s where the good things end.
The story does improve slightly before the mid-way mark with what I’ll call classic Palahniuk-isms – a daemon goddess orgasming in the middle of chomping off a teen’s head (not due to the chomping, I should add. But no more spoilers), the re-death (?) of Hitler and several other tyrants across history who have been languishing in hell so far, and a rather fine collection of scatological incidents. Maddy’s character makes several attempts at being richer, deeper and more interesting. And fails.
Predictably, ‘Damned’ ends with a whimper and promise which made me sadder than having read it: to be continued.
PS. I think the sequel is called Doomed. I’m not sure how I feel about that just yet.