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Anonymous
Posted February 24, 2013
Read it its good
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Posted September 12, 2012
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THIS REVIEW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.
Paul Tremblay’s Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye (ChiZine Publications) is a contemporary version of Animal Farm amped up on bitterness, future technology and sad realizations that things are not going to end well. Our unnamed narrator is forced into situations beyond his control, a reluctant hero in search of his mother, an angry youth who has little love left for his father, a boy not quite ready to be a man.
As a teen, he runs off to work at Farm, thinking he is helping his mother. Years later when his paychecks bounce back to him, her account closed, he fears the worst. An opportunity to escape presents itself, and he flees Farm, only to run into his father, who has set him up to be the next mayor of City—or perhaps just a patsy waiting for the fall.
Farm is corporate, Farm is omniscient, Farm is both alpha and omega. Trapped in meaningless jobs, a contract signed for slave wages with no way out, the environment is false, layered, and humiliating:
“If we don’t smile, if we don’t follow the tour Protocol to the capital P, if we break any rules, if we’re late for any shifts, if we swear at supervisors, if we swear at the animals, if we’re caught having sex on the job with co-worker or animal, if we’re caught stealing or eating or sabotaging the animals, we’re contractually and severely punished.”
So it goes. Tremblay paints a dystopian portrait in the gaps between the ritual and the work, the mundane and the weird. Picture this for a moment, the setting for Home—a world buried far underneath the ground, where the destitute go to die:
“Spread out before me is a living Escher painting. Denuded sequoia trees serve as the giant support posts for City and they are as big as anything I’ve ever seen, or even imagined, thicker than skyscrapers, their height disappearing into a cloudy darkness above. Struts and beams, both horizontal and angled span across the distances between the posts, some are wide enough for four lanes of two-way pedestrian traffic while others are as skinny as a flagpole. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern or reason to the construction of any of it. I see a spider web and then I blink and I see spokes in a bike tire, I blink again and I see the gnarled inner branches of a rose bush. All this I see in every direction, until darkness. And all over everything is humanity and their adaptations and appendages.”
But in addition to the futuristic setting, a society that is beyond comprehension, with its Farm and its Dump—Tremblay manages to take a step back from a story that is one depressing moment after another. He injects humor into the lives of his characters on a regular basis, which is a great relief to the reader, showing how these people deal with this strange new world. In speaking about his father, the Father, our narrator says:
“He’s starting to grow on me. Like a melanoma.”
The banter between our hero and his father, the Father, is riddled with good humor and insults, curse words and idle threats. It allows us to relax for a moment, to joke with them about their difficult situations, to ignore for a moment the harsh realities of the world they inhabit.
READ THE REST OF THIS REVIEW AT THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.
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