Order MAN DOWN here
(also reviewed)
Order DUST DEVILS here
Order ISHMAEL TOFFEE here
Order CAPTURE here
Order VILE BLOOD here
Order SACRIFICES here
''Listen, bitch, I think you have a problem understanding the chain of command here.''
Tanya stared at him, her breath ragged. ''Fuck you,'' she said and Turner couldn't but admire her kamikaze pluck.
German movie director Michael Haneke is a perennial favourite of pseudo-intellectual thrill seekers such as myself. In 1997, he released a particularly mean spirited piece of cinema called FUNNY GAMES, which preyed on the viewers' gullibility in order to terrify him. If this movie was extreme to you, please approach Roger Smith's latest novel MAN DOWN with caution. Read at your own risk. If you're like me and extreme literature is what you spread on your toasts in the morning, rejoice! Roger Smith's in killer shape and looking to claim the heavyweight title belt of gaze-into-the-abyss crime writers. MAN DOWN is some kind of ultimate nihilistic piece of literature that only an experienced writing hand like Smith could deliver with such gusto and fearlessness.
John Turner and his wife Tanya fled their home country of South Africa, hoping to find the American dream in Tucson, Arizona. Their new life seem peaceful enough: Turner's a successful businessman, Tanya became a respected college professor and their daughter Lucy is growing up sheltered from her nightmarish origins. A seemingly unexpected home invasion throws their precarious balance upside down and the truth about Turner starts surfacing. What's happening to his family is no twisted turn of fate. Since he was in South Africa, Turner has been the architect of his own demise, taking ill-advised decision at every crossroads. It's all catching up to him in the heart of the American desert.
Things have come full cricle for Roger Smith. He's become so apt at illustrating the desperate chaos South African life instills in the heart of men that he's now finding new ways to keep it fresh. Not only MAN DOWN is the most extreme novel he's ever written, but it's also his most ambitious. It's a non-linear narrative, deconstructing the chaotic and terrifying ordeal that is an home invasion and gradually revealing how deliberate and fatalistic of an event it really was for John Turner. Roger Smith zigs and zags through his protagonist's life, exploring the reasons behind Turner's ultimate turn of fate and leaving to his reader the (not always) difficult task to judge him.
''You don't drink?''
''No, I don't drink''
''But you used to?''
He nodded. ''Yes, now I'm dry.''
''You had a habit?''
''Yeah, there wasn't a drink or a party drug that I didn't love like a brother.''
Roger Smith is a very Shakespearean author. His novels are tragedies, the stories of men with inescapable curses. The Turner family has to be the most cursed family of them all, though. See, there is such a thing as a Smith-ian protagonist. It's a protagonist similar to what Michael Douglas used to play in late 1980s, early 1990s movies: duplicitous, but ultimately harmless. Self-involved, yet somewhat decent and balanced. They are vibrant and human. John Turner kind of breaks the mold here. He's not nice. He's not even an interesting villain. He's an all-out asshole. Someone that's difficult to have a hint of respect for. Same for his gung ho, nihilistic wife Tanya who seems to hate everything she's ever had.
I understand why Smith made these choices. Things get incredibly fucked up at some point, and if you had any form of sympathy for Turner, MAN DOWN would be disinvested of its meaning and it would look like Smith just tried to write the most demented and sadistic novel ever. So keeping a distance between the reader and Turner is necessary at all times. It's just that leading to the ultimate confrontation, it's difficult to read MAN DOWN with more than a clinical fascination. There's no character to tear the barrier of fiction down, it's ultimately for the reader's own good, but you'll have to show patience and faith in Roger Smith first.
I don't know how you can follow up on a novel like MAN DOWN. It's so extreme, yet embedded in the realm of rational possibilities that it's just difficult to figure out how to up the ante from here. MAN DOWN was not my favourite Roger Smith novel (CAPTURE probably is), but it's where we are in our writer-reader relationship. It's not a great place to start with Smith either, but it has a certain read-it-on-a-dare appeal. MAN DOWN kicks the ass of most horror novels when it comes down to the terror factor. It has both Shakespearean and Hitchcockian influences and yet has this inimitable fearlesssness that I know only Roger Smith can muster. MAN DOWN is a novel for long-time Smith fans and reckless thrill seekers. It's the kind of novel with a before and an after, read it if you dare.