Some writers
don’t even seem to have a clue that there are boundaries, that
there are rules for this sort of thing. That you ease the reader into
a world, that you build up things bit by bit, make the situation clear
and then start spinning off the unworldly and the unusual. There are,
of course rules, and those rules, of course, can be easily broken. But
to do so with the utter aplomb of Jon Couternay Grimwood, that takes
more than luck, more than smarts, perhaps something even more than talent.
Lots of writers create a premise and then explore that premise. Grimwood
operates on another level entirely, a level of pure language. He is a
reader's writer, a man who creates a world for the reader one word at
a time. There are no spares and there is no excess here. Letter by letter,
word by word, sentence by sentence Grimwood shows you that all worlds;
this one, the next, or the world that may exist millennia in the future,
each and every one is equally strange, equally unlikely, equally difficult
for the humans who inhabit them to populate, to understand. To live within.
The world we're introduced to in his latest novel, 'End of the World
Blues' is as alien as any we might find in the cosmos, even if it is
just half a world away. Kit Nouveau is a British ex-pat running an Irish
Pub in Tokyo. Married to an eccentric artist, he's also having an affair
with a gangster's wife. This proves to be an ill-thought decision, and
his friendship with a street urchin doesn't make things easier. Calling
herself Lady Neku, the urchin proves to be a refugee from a very weird
and distant future, where she's made some regrettable decisions. In fact,
everyone in the novel makes the kind of bad choices we've all made at
one time or another. In 'End of the World Blues', the complications unfold
around the globe and across the centuries.
Everything we read in this novel is built from the word up and it’s
important to talk about Grimwood's dense style. It is not for all tastes.
Grimwood is unique in his ability to meld the laconic style of a hard-boiled
noir with the visionary poetry of sparse, surreal science fiction. He
never explains when a suggestion will do the trick, he never elaborates
when a simple nod will tell the tale. His descriptions come in brilliant
shards, in pieces of cracked mirrors that might show the past, the present
the future or all three jumbled together. But the way that Grimwood puts
together his sentences, his paragraphs, the jump cuts and the segues,
creates a world more dense, more real than the one that surrounds you
when you read. Moreover, Grimwood's even-handed style puts everything
at the same level, so that the current day mystery settings and the far-flung
future settings are both strangely alien and piercingly real. There's
a bit of effort required to wrap your brain around the words, but it
is an effort that is rewarded by an utterly immersive reading experience.
A result of the dense prose style is that Grimwood's characters acquire
a certain gravity, the kind of reality required for them to strut about
amidst his precise, clipped words. This does not result in characters
that everyone might instantly like. Moments of selfishness result in
lifetimes of self-delusion, of self-evasion. Kit Nouveau is neither nice
nor smart. But there's a core of honesty at the center of Kit and every
character here, even those we dislike intensely. The result is that the
mix of the weird and honorable, the straightforward and the evasive,
the almost incomprehensibly alien and the everyday banal jerk-offs becomes
as real and as involving as a news story about something really wild,
something really awful and wonderful that happens to people you know.
Or wish you know. Or hope never, ever to meet.
For a man who writes with a most carefully turned prose style, Grimwood's
plotting is undeniably filmic. Earlier in this review I mentioned jump
cuts, and there are montages here as well, and bizarrely beautiful special
effects that come close to making sense but always, ever leave the reader
wondering what has been missed. Oh you'll read to find out what has been
missed, that much is certain. Grimwood is a master of starting off his
novels in a gritty here-and-now that cannot be denied, of setting in
motion criminal plots that have their roots in events just beyond the
readers' ken. And he is equally a master at taking readers from a world
that is if not comfortable is at least seemingly familiar and whip-sawing
them into a world that is entrancingly hallucinatory.
There's a certain pleasure that happens when you read great science fiction,
or really, any form of fiction. That is the feeling of being confronted
with the inscrutable, of being shown a world or series of events that
you can contain but not quite connect. Readers know they have all the
pieces. Grtimwood is a master at creating such prose worlds, stitching
together a gritty mystery and an astonishing vision. If his work seems
inscrutable it is but for a moment. 'End of the World Blues' is both
a twist-filled, current-day mystery and a thought-provoking vision of
the future. Grimwood's inscrutability gives way to the revelation that
there is but a single way to experience this novel; read it, beginning
to end. There are no shortcuts, only one word to follow another, one
world to follow another, until there are no more words or worlds but
that of this immersive, inventive novel.