Jens Porup

The War on Drugs.
The War on Terror.
The War on Fat.

So we're talking satire, with as much subtlety as a politician on the election campaign. Which is not my favourite sort of satire I've got to admit. So THE UNITED STATES OF AIR and I struggled to come to an understanding from the beginning.

You can see the point it's trying to make - the willingness of people to believe any old garbage spouted at them from "on high" - whether the "on high" is religious, political, some combination of both or just some bat-shit crazy loony from down the street.

I can also remember Breatharians (or whatever they call themselves) actually going to the extreme of dying because they didn't believe they needed to eat (or something ... when we're talking that bat-shit crazy I tend to be looking for an exit rather than closely playing attention).

From that standpoint, the lack of subtlety probably makes some sense - there's no point in standing up to a battalion armed with an icepick and an attitude after all.... but at some point the exaggerations got so over the top and the humour attempting to choke me to death if I didn't agree got to me ... and not only did I find myself not agreeing, I couldn't for the life of me work out why I was bothering.

Which was a pity as the climax has some important points to make, but I'd worked so hard to get there, it took me a while to recognise the skewering that the consequences of blind adherence will get you.

It's decidedly possible that this was simply the wrong book for me. Maybe if you're a strong believer in the power of the icepick then you will get it in spades, but for me, THE UNITED STATES OF AIR laid the lampooning on so thick the poor little message at it's core drowned.

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/united-states-air-jm-porup… (lisätietoja)

Based on the blurb I was reasonably sure THE SECOND BAT GUANO WAR wasn’t going to be my kind of thing but I occasionally get suckered by the nagging quadrant of my brain into worrying that if I only ever read things I think I will like I will miss out on good and/or horizon-expanding reading. Sometimes this turns out to be true (e.g. Ken Bruen’s THE DRAMATIST). And sometimes it doesn’t.

Horace “Horse, as in hung like a…” Mann feels guilty. Before he felt guilty he felt angry so he left his ex-wife, the child that wasn’t really his but for whom he is financially responsible and the country he no longer wants any part of. He ended up in Lima, Peru where his personal life turns into a genuine horror. Hence the guilt.

Horse teaches English to the city’s criminals (so they can more successfully rob the kind of tourists that Horse disdains) and is a minor drug dealer. He has made ‘friends’ with a sociopath called Pitt Watters who is the American ambassador’s son and a CIA killer. When he disappears Pitt’s mother, whom Horse sometimes has sex with, asks Horse to try to find him. Which he proceeds to do. Very, very slowly.

The opening hundred or so pages of THE SECOND BAT GUANO WAR include scenes in which the main character snorts cocaine off a urine-splashed toilet, has trouble finding a place on his body where he hasn’t already burned himself with cigarettes which is his preferred form of self-harm (for the record he chooses an armpit on this occasion), is taken to a bondage club in which a man is whipped until he bleeds for the entertainment of others, has a conversation with his friend’s wife while she removes her vibrator from an orifice and puts it, wet and sticky, on the coffee table between them and has his head plunged into a bucket of shit. The remaining 300 or so pages contain an equal number of similar scenes but I think you get the point.

This is the best evidence I can give of the sensibility of the novel. If all of that sounds like your thing then by all means track down a copy (one of you is welcome to mine if you ask nicely). If it doesn’t sound like your cup of tea then give the book a miss because there is a lot more of the same.

In fact to me it is an endless series of such happenings with little in the way of connecting narrative (though to be fair there is more story in the second half of the novel) (there’s still a lot of violence and bodily fluids but some stuff does happen). Even so, with barely any agency at all Horse lurches around the seediest parts of Peru allowing himself to die. Slowly. Via a series of flashbacks he does tell the reader what terrible event has led to this sorry state of affairs but as the core of this horror is given away by the book’s blurb much of the suspense that might otherwise have been provided here is effectively obliterated. And even in what is objectively a (if not the) defining moment of his miserable life everything happens to Horse or around him.

I’ve no earthly clue who the ideal reader of this book would be. My noir-adoring friend wasn’t intrigued enough by the blurb to take the free copy I tried to press upon him and now, having read it, I cannot think of a single person I know to whom I would suggest it. As a white, Australian, woman who would be considered middle-class with a smattering of exotic travel and one or two of the average human being’s troubles in my background I have absolutely no frame of reference for this novel. Twenty years ago I’d have seen this as some kind of personal flaw on my part. Now I just count my blessings. I am entirely comfortable…indeed grateful…that I don’t ‘get’ this novel.

I am prepared to admit that my lack of connection to anything going on here is not entirely the book’s fault (with me never having been a self-destructive, America-hating, bloke with an enormous penis) it’s not something I’m going to accept much blame for either. I didn’t have anything in common with the people depicted in Sean Doolittle’s LAKE COUNTRY either and I loved it. The differences, for me, are in the presence of a recognisable narrative structure and in the tenderness Doolittle clearly felt for life’s outsiders. Because of that I could, and did, develop my own relationship with the ‘designated loser’ in that novel, even though I couldn’t easily relate his situation (as a rage-fuelled, near-alcoholic, ex-soldier) to anything from my own experience. I’ve no clue what, if any, emotions Porup feels towards the mess of a human being he has created in Horse (or Pitt or Pitt’s mother or Pitt’s father or Horse’s ex or any of the other human detritus that populates this tome). All I know for sure is that he didn’t do anything to make me care whether any of them lived or died, though I’d certainly have been chirpier about it all if their collective fate had taken less than 400 pages to arrive.

One of the things I normally give a bit of thought to at the end of a book is what the author might have been trying to achieve with it and whether or not they managed it. I’m sure I’m often wildly inaccurate but it’s rare that I can’t make a stab at it. Here I’ve no idea. Shock? If so it failed in my case because there was too much awfulness. Each incident of sad debauchery mixed with violence followed so closely on the heels of its predecessor that there’s no time to process any of them at an emotional level. Entertain? I am confident I am (for once) one of the majority of readers who would find the tone and language of this novel too far outside their comfort zone for it to be enjoyable for all but a few. Inform? I suppose the “America is evil” theme is vaguely educational but this message is bludgeoned into proceedings rather than being deftly laid out and in my experience that kind of heavy-handedness rarely attracts new converts. Even many (most?) of those already converted to this way of thinking would, I’d wager, prefer a less crude and violent preacher.

Whatever the intent, for me reading THE SECOND BAT GUANO WAR was a chore. Not the kind of chore that is hard work but ultimately satisfying. Just the kind that is hard work. The level of violence and crudity was too high and mostly gratuitous (i.e. being without apparent reason). The pace was slow, indeed glacial for the first half of the novel, due to the aimless ‘narrative’ and repetition of basic elements (how many scenes of seemingly pleasure-free auto-erotic masturbation are needed to indicate the rockiest of bottoms has been reached?). The imagery ranged from plain awful (with almost everyone being described via some reference to their sexual organs) to outright silly (Pitt’s wife, for example, is introduced with these words “…her eyes blue balls of fire. Another cock-hungry American whore”…”she cocked those blue balls of fire sideways, as if taking aim with a shotgun”). I did not find any of it funny or thought-provoking or engaging or any of the other things that might have made it worth my time. If that makes me boring or bourgeois or close-minded…meh.… (lisätietoja)

I received this book as a LibraryThing give away in return for a review.
Don't believe the blurb that the book is a satire on the so called War on Terror, it goes much further than that. I like my satire subtle and pointed whereas The United States Of Air is in your face, lampooning everything which smacks of zealous, centralised, control and the willingness of a populace to suck up fear and propoganda on the basis that it must be good for them and that dissenters must therefore be an enemy.
Where the book wins is that it makes one appreciate that so many aspects of what we may loosely refer to as 'Western' life are touched by the madness we perceive only to exist in alien cultures or dictatorial regimes. The author delivers his punches with outrageous exaggeration, which can be ridiculous but then you remember it is after all satire not intended to be realistic in detail only in principle.
So exaggerated in fact that it can be easy to miss the subtleties which abound and exist on almost every page, and one can only wonder at the author's tendency to labour a joke repeatedly, not least in an obsessive use of scatological humour bordering on the obscene at times which drowns out the more enjoyable and wry prose.
The climax of the book leaves the reader open mouthed at the almost casual revelation of the hideous, familiar, consequences of evangelical zeal and centralised power in a democratic society yielding division, hatred and dehumanising of your enemy, in the pursuit of some higher ideal, even as the evangelists themselves manipulate the populace while wildly abusing their own sacred principles.
The final sentiment is that the author uses absurdity to prove that the unimaginable is actually happening right here, right now, and that the ultimate consequences can be precisely what we believe we are fighting to protect.
The United States Of Air is an easy read with the subtle satire well buried beneath the absurd lampooning and overuse of the ridiculous yet whilst the characters fade quickly from the mind after the reading is done, the messages stay vividly imprinted.
The book would benefit from being shorter, and from being less reliant on scatology; the author clearly has it in him to do better so it will be worth keeping an eye out for J.M. Porup.… (lisätietoja)