By Bryce Allen
170 pages
Publisher: Bedlam Press (March 14, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1939065593
ISBN-13: 978-1939065599
If David Lynch scripted a spy
novel featuring a hardboiled detective and set in a dystopian future with a
remarkable resemblance to our own present, it might look a lot like Bryce Allen's
debut novel, The Spartak Trigger.
And then again, it might not. There are no
dancing dwarves, for example. No exploding shacks in the middle of the desert.
Not a single Cabaret-esque emcee to leer at the audience and provide that
requisite Lynch touch of weirdness.
But Spartak isn't plenty of
weird without it: a morose albino, a pimply nerd who can get into almost any computer system, steal anyone's identity and create passable identification documents, even passports, a TV announcer with a lazy eye who's
involved in some sort of massive fraud, and a non-profit called the Myopic Deity
Convention which supports the Chinese oppression of Tibet.
Not to mention a conglomerate of
social networking organizations that wants to take over the world and
enslave every man, woman and child alive.
Oh, wait. That isn't the weird
part; that's the part based on what's really going on.
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Bryce Allen: Spartak is like a spy novel with a hardboiled detective hero scripted by David Lynch. And laughs. Lots of laughs. |
Let me summarize: Shane Bishop, crooked ex-cop turned private
eye -- of a sort -- works for a company called Sancus that hires out to
"dirty up" corporate executives so that the companies they work for
can get rid of them.
After a series of assignments,
Bishop finds himself framed for murdering one of his targets. He undertakes an
investigation to find out who is really responsible for the slaying and the
reason it occurred, but is sidelined into a series of side plots and narrative
digressions that seem to move him no closer to a rational explanation.
Let me put this succinctly: this is really pretty funny stuff. A lot of it is so over the top that it will have you shaking your head with that little smile on your face that Bill Murray wore when Dustin Hoffman pulled off his wig on national TV in "Tootsie." This, my friends, is one nutty hospital.
At first this seems to be a straight hardboiled tale. Then the strange-o stuff starts until it is flowing as hot and fast as spilled diner cooking fat.
Let me put this succinctly: this is really pretty funny stuff. A lot of it is so over the top that it will have you shaking your head with that little smile on your face that Bill Murray wore when Dustin Hoffman pulled off his wig on national TV in "Tootsie." This, my friends, is one nutty hospital.
At first this seems to be a straight hardboiled tale. Then the strange-o stuff starts until it is flowing as hot and fast as spilled diner cooking fat.
Eventually the reader begins to
wonder how much of Bishop's story is real and how much is simply his own -- or
somebody else's -- fantasy. Our protagonist seems to be engaged in a constant
internal conversation with a "narrator" who offers minor observations
about the details of particular scenes, descriptions of what is happening
around him and other ephemera. These "narrations" are more like stage
directions than actual story-telling. They really narrate nothing.
Plot lines suddenly double back
on themselves inexplicably. Ludicrous coincidences pile up like zombies at a shooting gallery. At times Bishop seems amazingly shrewd; at others,
so stupid he couldn't find his asshole if he was sitting on his hands.
Eventually, you begin to doubt whether Bishop even exists as anything other than a character in a story somebody is writing. What makes you wonder are passages like the following:
There’s an awkward pause in the action and then the editor starts
giving the narrator crap about the alarming number of typos and other such
gaffes that he’s finding in this allegedly “finished” manuscript. The narrator
defends himself by claiming that he’s *intentionally* included a specific
quantity of typos [and] various other grammatical/syntax-related mistakes in order to
give his work an ‘unstructured, spontaneous, Kerouac-esque’ feel.
Along the way, Allen seems to
violate many of the key rules of narrative technique. But as the internal
commentator who lives inside Bishop's head says at one point: "The narrator doesn't seem to care since he’s not ‘bound by the
shackles of traditional storytelling.' "
Did I mention already that
Spartak Trigger is a parody? Oh. Sorry about that.
I'd go on, but that would be
telling. Instead, let me just say that by the final page, most everything has
been explained. Sort of. Don't worry about the loose ends, though: getting to them is more than half the fun.
As Bishop might say: "Pretty
weird. Also pretty gay."
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