It’s Sunday the 29th of June and I’m only a quarter of the way through this book, but I’ve got to start this review now. Palahniuk is a writer who’s just too good to be legal. He’s very much a scrapbook writer, taking bits of stories from annecdotes and events across his life and letting them percolate until they dribble out in snippets at opportune moments across his books. This is habit I’m fast falling into as I cultivate it. I admire this man to the extent where I wish to remove the top of my skull and rub his magic writing hands onto the oily surface of my brain. There’s a quirk I have about writer’s hands, but that’s a story for another time.

I see Palahniuk as a mad scientist of a writer, who starts a novel in the form of a big beaker of bubbling liquid on a tripod over a Bunsen burner. Behind him in his mental laboratory are shelves upon shelves of test tubes filled with clear liquid, labeled with writing too small to read. He takes from this array of ideas and observations with a pipet, adding single drops to the beaker and watching it flash and smoke. After weeks of adding, boiling and mixing, he pours the contents into a sheep’s stomach, staples a bow onto it and presents it in a book shop.

Haggis is lovely, by the way. The majority of the best food in the world looks foul.

So, Rant then.

*

Like all of Palahniuk’s novels it’s misleading as to what the plot’s actually about, doing something of a M. Night Shyamlan in the last quarter (only far less crap) and picking up plot threads that have been woven in all along but didn’t seem of that much significance to begin with.

Rant is the story of an extradordinary and faintly grotesque lad who almost starts a rabies pandemic.  It’s told entirely from character’s points of view in an almost interview style, and you piece together the story from all these titbits.  There’s a sport in it called Party Crashing, where people organise themselves into having a symbol on their car during a certain window of time and then smash into each other to get off on the shock and giddy thrill of impact.  This all turns out to be a much bigger deal than some quirky subplot towards the end when Palahnuik starts exploring different theories of time, pitching them so convincingly and with such carefully chosen real-world examples that you think that what happens in the book really could happen.

Palahniuk likes to become a bit of an expert on things before he writes about them.  Here it’s anatomy, crash theory and concepts of time, and what should be dry explanations are compelling.  He also becomes self-referential about his genre of prose, transgression, by looking into themes of the carnivalesque and the inversion of social boundaries.  This made the student in me rather chuffed, to be honest.

Don’t read the first thirty pages of this book whilst you’re eating.  I started Rant in an Italian restaurant with pasta, crayfish tails and a creamy sauce.  This was a mistake as I was reading in detail about ’sex storms’, where the wind knocks over the bins and tears away condoms, tampons and sanitary towels and leaves them fluttering on barbed wire fences.  Interesting stuff.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 9:24 am and is filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.