Spoiler alert: I loved this
book.
I raced through 43% in one sitting
before I was forced to countenance a pee break. This is absolutely
compulsive, fingers-bitten-ragged stuff.
It
has only been a few hours but already I miss
pelting helter-skelter through 1989 Long Island in the company
of pitch-perfect 19-year-old punk “Golden” Dawn Seliger.
I loved Dawn, a fascinating and
believable anti-heroine in a patriarchal world that only respects
anti-heroes. She is a tough, smart, disciplined and fearless
feminist; a lover of depth over surface.
Mamatas is a master of illustrating
character. There were several perfectly succinct descriptors that
made me smile with delight, such as: “When he ran a red light,
that was the revolution. When he stopped for the next one, that was
also the revolution.”
We hunt with Dawn as she tries to find
out who killed Bernstein (her mentor and lover) and why. For a murder
mystery, the intense merging of hard-to-blend Crowleyan magick and
Marxism
on show in this book is
a heady mix. As a lover of all things hermetic and leftie myself, I
do wonder how the trad detective-novel brigade have taken to this
tale. Are they able to keep up with all the qliphoth and communists?
I will admit that there is something
uncomfortable about seeing your own interests and beliefs reflected.
Seeing the power (and limitations) of focus and Will. Seeing
something personal made political, the esoteric made exoteric, the
occult revealed and it doesn't look so great out sunning its warts in
the light. “Of course, some might argue that magick is a course
in applied psychosis.”
As Dawn digs deeper into the mystery,
we see that in this world there are no coincidences, all is
synchronicity. Everything is tied together in a vast web. Every thing
and every person has a role to play. To be honest, I stopped caring
who killed Bernstein, I was just raptly enjoying how well everything
jigsawed together.
Running through the whole tale is an
infectious anger, simmering like the “black thing from the
Abyss” that rises within Dawn upon occasion. With the writer as
our retro-prophet, viewing the America of today through the lens of
the past makes it all the more horrifyingly dystopian:
“'By the dawn of the new
millennium,' Bernstein told me, 'fucking Ayn Rand
will be considered a serious philosopher. Democrats will be pulling
off shit that Ronny Ray-gun wets the bed dreaming of – slave labour
for welfare mothers, permanent military bases all over the Middle
East, torture chambers deep underground, bugs in every phone and
office fax machine, computer chips in everything else, and robotic
stealth bombers doing all the dirty work. And that will be the
liberalism of the epoch.'”
We barrel through concepts and ideas
that urge further thought, from creating identity through consumption
(“But all I was doing was buying, then leaving. I was the worst
sort of commodity fetishist; in trying to consume the life I wanted,
all I was eating was my own slow death.”) to the logic of the
middle class (“But all Long Island is fearful now. What
if nuclear war isn't inevitable? How are we going to pay down the
mortgages on our homes? That's the logic of the middle class.”).
Every moment, every scene, has its own devastatingly witty lines:
“'Because he's a Marxist. And he has money.' 'How do you know he
has money?' 'Because he's a Marxist! Poor people on Long Island don't
care about Marxism. It's a rich person's hobby, like collecting
vintage decoy ducks.'”
