Books
Out of the dark
by David Larsen
I feel as if I’ve just been mugged. Nigel Cox’s new novel is the strangest, cleverest thing I’ve read since … since Nigel Cox’s last novel, actually. Cox’s writing radiates off-the-wall intelligence the way a nuclear power plant radiates energy. But let’s begin with the nuclear waste. Responsibility is not a comfortable book to have sitting in your memory.
Martin Rumsfield, the narrator, is a New Zealander working on a Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Martin is fiftyish, married, in love with his wife and just as in love with his kids. We first meet him down by one of Berlin’s many lakes, blowing soap bubbles with his five-year-old. He is the very image of a carefree family man. But the water is dark, there are clouds overhead, soap bubbles are things that pop, and none of these details feels incidental.
Enter Stevens. Martin, it turns out, has a low-level shady past, in which he smoked a lot of dope and ran errands for a shabby con artist posing as a private detective. One day this con artist turns up at Martin’s front door. He has a new scam. He needs a helper. Oh, and a place to stay. Martin promptly installs him in the basement.
Excuse me?
“Listen to me: sometime’s a man’s gotta take a walk out in the night.”
Oh, right. Respectable, middle-aged Martin needs a taste of danger. Superficially plausible. But Martin is a clever, self-aware guy – Cox invests him with a casually penetrating mind, which makes him a beguiling, entertaining presence – and Stevens is more than just a manipulative loser looking for free room and board. Even before he utters the charming couplet “Old enough to bleed – old enough to slaughter”, it’s clear that he views Martin’s 13-year-old daughter Sally, who’s already all but off the rails, as a tasty little morsel. Martin, good at reading people and devoted to his children, has invited Mr Wolf to live downstairs.
Though this is not a fun book to have read, it’s a fun book to read. It’s even a funny one. There are few New Zealand novelists who can match Cox at descriptive writing, or at wordplay. When Martin and Stevens set out on a reccy and meet an unfriendly dog, and Stevens tries to shoot the dog, and loses his gun, and they subsequently encounter the same dog while trying to retrieve the gun, and Martin gets his head stuck between the railings of a bridge, and the police show up, the evolving scenario unspools like a Marx brothers film. At the same time, this is the story of an intelligent man putting a blowtorch to his daughter’s face and acting surprised when she gets burnt. The combination is deeply discomforting; my reading notes are mostly variations on “does not compute”.
Do we invoke Freud? Martin doesn’t see the danger because the hairy guy living in the basement is himself; Stevens is the embodiment of his own repressed desires for Sally. Yeah, sure, except that Martin does see the danger. He sees his own growing physical awareness of her, and judges it benign, correctly. He sees Stevens’s interest in her, and judges it pathological, again correctly. But he does nothing about it until the roof falls in. Forget Freud – to really address this book’s inner tensions, you need to invoke Germany. It’s no accident that when Sally goes missing and Martin sets out to find her, he finds himself driving in the direction of the work camp he’s in the process of converting into a museum.
The tired old questions: how could human beings do what the Nazis did? How could the nation of Bach become the nation of Hitler? It’s hard to stare down the barrel of those questions without feeling a bewildered self-contempt: this, astonishingly, is what we’re capable of. And Martin certainly provokes bewilderment and contempt. With his eyes wide open, he allows something terrible to happen to his own daughter, and he does it for venal, petty reasons. It doesn’t add up. The question is, why, after the Holocaust, do we assume that human actions will?
Cox has taken a huge risk with Responsibility. Its combination of the noir and the comic seems precisely calculated to disturb. Having left a vile taste in your mouth, it then challenges you to work out what the taste means, and, intellectualise as you will, none of the answers are emotionally satisfying, let alone pleasant. The book is a slap in the face. Despite feeling a strong desire to slap Cox back, I have to say that it’s also an impressive piece of work.
RESPONSIBILITY, by Nigel Cox (VUP, $29.95).
