Review of Declan Burke's Absolute Zero Cool: a Russian doll of a novel

Apart from the fact that it is a challenging, pleasing, provocative, wise-cracking read, there are at least three more reasons Declan Burke's most recent novel, Absolute Zero Cool, should be made obligatory reading for every innocent young student wishing to dedicate his or her life to any form of art, and who takes on the loan necessary to enroll in an institute of higher education, whether it be for acting, painting, sculpting or "creative writing".  I will come back to the three reasons, towards the end of this review.




Below are a few paragraphs describing what the novel is about, from the main character's point of view.

You are the half-finished, perhaps never-to-be-finished, creation of a struggling crime writer.  Even he has put you to one side, and forgotten you, and the only people who may still be aware of your existence are his former literary agent and an employee of the Irish Arts Council.  Apart from the fact that he has left you in Limbo, you don't like the way the author, a man with a strong resemblance to Declan Burke,  has created you.  In fact, many, many elements of his discarded manuscript displease you.

He has given you a name, sometimes abbreviated to its first initial, that would be more at home in a novel written in German, in Prague, at the beginning of the 20th century, or in a normal, classical Swedish crime novel by somebody like Henning Mankell.  In the Irish crime writer's hands you have become a hospital porter, selling candy bars to your elderly charges, cleaning their vomit up after them, and committing the occasional act of euthanasia. If you could have your own way, you'd probably ask the writer's agent to propose the manuscript to somebody like Mankell, or Arnaldur Indridason, to polish up your character in a conventional, Scandinavian crime, while giving you an Irish first name, and making you more of a hero than has this author, in whose judgement you have no confidence, and from whose jaded hands you have fallen into oblivion.  However, you are destined to be the creature of this Burke-like writer, and the only hope you have of getting some self-respect is by preying on him until you can get him to bend his will to your own idea of a satisfactory plot. To achieve your objective, you are willing to push him to that level of psychological distress at which he will betray his own family's security in order to satisfy your ego. 

The author, who may not really be who he thinks he is, finally gets the long awaited retreat, financed by the Irish Arts Council, that will give him the peace and quiet to finish a novel that may, at long last, encounter some financial success. His wife, who has made incredible self-sacrifice so that her man can practise his craft, sends him away content in the knowledge that he now has the space in which to come up with the goods. You, however, Bill, wait for the right moment, at the retreat, and then you appear to him, screwing up any possibility of his finishing the new novel before he has come to terms with you. You make threats, you ask him to rename you, you tell him you are worthy of a more noble crime than topping old people in distresss.  He tells you he doesn't have the time to take care of you.

You work out a deal with the crime writer. You propose to rewrite a large part of the manuscript yourself, saying that this will ease the burden he has to carry. He knows better. Your redrafting work should, in theory, free up his mind enough to let him do what he really needs to do at the retreat, but in fact, he already knows that you are the sort of attention-seeking parasite who doesn't give a fuck what happens to his new novel. Against his better instincts, and his wife's threat to rewrite the marriage contract, if he doesn't put his nose to the grindstone,  the unfortunate writer, who is going to go broke if he does turn his attention back to you, and be seriously hassled if he doesn't, has to comment on your chapters about yourself and take on the role of an editor or literary agent.

You make every novice writer's mistake in the book. The author tries to point this out to you, but you won't listen. You introduce large chunks of indigestible prose, about the Greek goddess of the moon and Herostratus, to cite just one example, which nearly drown out the comic stuff you are good at: wise-cracking, smart-assing and diverting attention away from your own crimes by discussing the self-isolation of the Polynesians. You deliberately leave your manuscript lying around in places where your girlfriend can see what you have written about her. The realisation she may be in danger frightens her to the point she leaves you.

You weren't content with the original version of the story, but, in your own version, you commit acts nearly as heinous as euthanasia. You find an alibi for the time you need to spend hiding the bomb in the hospital by giving your unwitting ex-girlfriend a date rape drug, which will ensure that she accuses you of abusing her while you were up to something else. You pose, on the social networks, as a young girl barely out of her teens, so that you can entrap, and make an accomplice, out of the laptop-equipped pervert who thinks he's the one who's grooming you.

At a more psychotic level, you manipulate the writer who has written you, in any way you wish: you disappear for days when he needs to work you out of his system; you turn up when he least has time to cater to your whims. You play around with everything he holds dear, even going so far as to blowing up the hospital just as the writer's family needs it the most. In the end you decide to take Burke down with you. You are blown to virtual smithereens, but, back in the real world, he is the one who will have to do a minimum of five years inside for the crimes you forced him to write and carry through; the sentence will be longer if his plea of criminal insanity isn't taken into account.

So, why do I recommend that this rewarding, comic, yet harrowing, novel be given to students as a learning tool and a health warning?




Firstly, it shows the Matryoshka, or Russian nesting doll, aspect of writing a novel, or creating anything that risks becoming bigger than oneself. As a writer, you like to think you are the biggest doll in the room, but are you in fact nested inside what you have written? The writer of Absolute Zero Cool is a character in his own right and he has the novel of his own life--Who am I? Who amn't I?--to maintain on a satisfactory level. But he finds himself grappling with a cuckoo-like character, in what he thought to be the old nest of a discarded novel,  who comes to life in unexpected ways, not only challenging his maker, but wishing to nest within the two of them another novel, containing another character and another plot. In the end, the cuckoo in the nest tries to turn his egg into a plot that will attempt to nest inside its bilious stomach the biggest doll of them all, the author. If you are still with me, now read on.




Secondly, it will be an indication to the most committed, but unwitting, students of how their craft will reinvent them, take them out of their comfort zones, and extract a personal cost for devoting their lives to high or low art, including the possibility of destroying their nearest and dearest in pursuit of the perfect piece of work.  Picasso and Dylan Thomas are only two examples of great artists who were very imperfect human beings, and who made people, who loved them, suffer.  How can you devote your life to becoming a great writer or actor, and still find the time or dedication to be an admirable family man? A type of schizophrenia ensues, in Absolute Zero Cool, in which the novelist begins to wonder if he has free will, or if his enthrallment with his creation, or compulsion to write a great novel, is bringing his life to the edge where the order he has been able to maintain up till now will finlly tip over into chaos. By following where his creation leads him, the writer may in fact destroy, or starve, himself, or those close to him. Knut Hamsun's Hunger comes to mind.




Thirdly, the novel will provide enough material to the teacher to keep a discussion going over the whole three years of the degree program.  Derrida's techniques for deconstruction can easily be applied: the students will be able to see how the stuff Declan Burke didn't write is, in fact, the hidden architecture of what he did write.  Jacques Lacan's famouse phrase, "If I can't think where I am, how can I be where I think?" can be used to illuminate Absolute Zero Cool's use and abuse of the subsidized writer's retreat.  The students can, as their final assignment, be asked to rewrite the book from the point of any number of characters: the writer's agent or wife, Bill's girlfriend, the pedophile known as Yasmin, or the old man whose life would have been snuffed out by the hospital porter, if the porter hadn't challenged the fate Burke wanted to saddle him with. They will be able to see for themselves that Absolute Zero Cool contains more than enough material for a couple of thousand conventional novels.




My own rewriting of the plot would require ending the novel with the first chapter. As it takes the reader to its cathartic conclusion, he or she wonders who is writing whom and who in the hell is plotting or planting what: who's in charge, is it the author or is it his character or has the reader even become guilty for some of the shit that is happening?  I suggest that, when you finish the book,  turn back to the first two pages of chapter one, reread them, and you will find that any question you may have had about the ending finds its answer, except for one: if the well-dressed man at the end of the bed is neither a pimp nor a lawyer, does this mean that he is a literary agent, accosting the hapless author on his hospital bed to make him come up with a more commercial, noirish, ending?




In some of the reviews of Absolute Zero Cool, the novel has been compared to Flann O'Brien's oeuvre, and I have no quarrel with this, although it may be limiting Burke to too small a literary scene.  People outside Ireland may well ask, "Who's Flann O'Brien?" To which I would reply that he was an Irish experimental writer who, in his lifetime, never got the rewards he deserved, for many reasons, but to really understand O'Brien's own accomplishments you would need to compare and contrast him with a few other European writers, who often plowed a long and lonely furrow before being acknowledged in death.   




On the wider, European stage, Burke's very serious playfulness reminds me of the accomplishments of the Czech writer, Bohumil Hrabal, and the French writers Georges Perec, Marcel Aymé and Michel Houellebecq. Pirandello's play, "Six Characters in Search of an Author", is also a worthy benchmark, and I could easily imagine Absolute Zero Cool being adapted for the stage. Houellebecq's novels are very different to Burke's, but they share some of the nihilistic characteristics Burke displays in his cynical take on the middle-class routines and pretensions of the country we both come from.




In his first novel, Eightball Boogie, Burke demonstrated his mastery of the hard-bitten, wise-cracking noir novel and he has, so far, made his name in the framework of Irish crime fiction.  With this novel, he has moved into a larger, perhaps more challenging, league. Where does Declan Burke go from here? Will he slip back into the genre of the crime novel, or will he pick up another gauntlet, and become Ireland's answer to Michel Houellebecq? Absolute Zero Cool shows that if he does decide to write the great tragi-comic Irish 21st century novel, it is a task for which he is well-equipped.