Finally, Some Good News- A Review

Like skinny jeans, sleeve tattoos and compassionless sectarian politics , apocalyptic fiction has been fashionable for a good long while now. Over a decade at this point.

Why?

Well I’d argue that no matter how bleak and gory and nihilistic and violent it gets, post- apocalyptic fiction has a strong element of fantasy to it. Of longing. On behalf of both the creator and the audience who consume it.

There is an unspoken, unfulfilled need within these tales of zombies and irradiated wastelands and cities reduced to rubble and warring tribes of scavengers.

It is a fantasy. It is a secret wish.

But what is it exactly?

The answer is simple. No, that is the answer- the deep craving for simplicity.

The post-apocalyptic fantasy world is gloriously, comfortingly simple. You find food, you kill any zombies you come across, you maraud the neighbouring settlement while stopping them doing the same to you.

A child could understand it.

In this charred and barren fantasy world there’s no commuting or servicing credit card debt, there’s no car repayments or variable interest rate mortgages, there’s no news cycle or index tracking pension plans or endless, fruitless shimmying up the greased pole of career advancement. There’s no apps. There’s no algorithm-driven ideological echochambers, there’s no fraught and harrying sexual marketplace, there’s no endless toiling at the upkeep of a digitized self for the benefit of nameless strangers who you are at heart deeply ambivalent towards.

In short, the entire rat race and its myriad discontents are wiped out with the quick-and-easy press of the Big Red Button, with the dropping of a mere handful of nuclear bombs.

With the mere stroke of the authors pen.

Nuclear Winter is A Snow Day

Imagine the atomic-fuelled erasure of all contemporary discontents. The imposition, at last, of purpose and drive and clear stakes on life. The ending- in an instant- of boredom and technocratic tickbox absurdity and the 9-to-5 malaise.

It has an appeal doesn’t it?

Or, to quote our author Delicious Tacos:

He dreamed he was walking. Looked down and his hands were holding papers. Folders of mistakes he’d made. It was the day of his annual review. In one of more areas he had not been Very Satisfactory. He woke up thinking he was late. Then remembered. There had been a nuclear holocaust.

Thank God, he thought.

Then felt bad. Millions dead. Millions more burned. Irradiated. Trapped even now, lungs half crushed choking on smoke. Pinned in flaming rubble. Can’t even scream, and if they did- who would come.

Still. It felt like a snow day.

The contemporary and corrupted American Dream™️ of slaving for money to buy consumerist nonsense destroyed in favour of the original American Dream. That of the clean slate, the fresh start, the chance to carve out a piece of wilderness and- no matter how arduous and handscrabble- to live on your own terms.

This short novel is the first time that I have seen the secret impulse of apocalypse literature discussed openly and honestly.

I mean, the book is called Finally, Some Good News for crying out loud.

Few admit this openly but the end of the world would mean the end of this world and there is a lot in this world that could be happily jettisoned.

I admire Mr Tacos’ (is it just ‘Delicious’ to his friends? ‘DT’?) honesty in this regard, and the jaundiced but unflinching eye with which he looks at the plight of a man as he sinks into middle aged obsolescence in a culture driven by branding and optics.

But I never found these sighing, cynical, worldly evocations and evisceration of the heartless modern West depressing. Gallows funny, yes. But I was never scrambling for a length of rope and a chair to kick out from under myself. And I think I know why…

Bird Watching In The End Times

The people who recommended this book told me that Mr Tacos here is the American Houllebecq. Which is as much a curse as it is praise, though it’s an obvious and logical touchstone. Our author himself touches upon this:

She hated Michel Houllebecq. Liked Slavoj Zizek, which she’d practiced saying. Her purse was open. He saw homeopathic remedies. Yes but Zizek is just a Houllebecq character, he said. An ugly man pretending to be deep for pussy.

And therein lies the difference. This is not an ugly book though it touches upon a few fairly ugly truths. The Houllebecq books I have read- though at times deeply incisive and powerful and indeed courageous in their tackling of the things that you just don’t talk about in nice, polite society- were frankly fucking miserable. They wallowed in the (powerfully rendered) mire.

They are all problem without solution, diagnosis without prognosis for a culture that’s doomed. There are no comforts- synthetic or otherwise- for the palliative patient that is ‘The West’

His works, though at times brilliant, are both sex-obsessed and completely humourless- those two most prominent bulbs on the garlic necklace of stereotypical French traits.

Whereas Mr Tacos- perhaps in spite of himself- has a streak of optimism like the white stripe on a black stunk. The end of the world is good news because the nukes wiped out the bad while allowing the good to continue, if not to potentially thrive anew.

We see this in the birds.

The key to this book is the through-line of the birds (our nameless hero is a hobbyist bird watcher) who are taken from Amazon headwaters and drugged and transported to America. Who if they don’t suffocate are caged. And yet in spite of this some manage to escape back to nature. Some make it.

And there it is, that great American irrepressible hope- as bright as tropical feathers.

The cage of modernity (or postmodern living, or Silicon Valley driven distopia, or however you want to phrase it) is there but some of us make it in spite of this.

Which is the best news that I’ve heard in a while.

 

Until next time,

Tom.