Comics Of The Cosmic Kind

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday May 19, 1989

VAN IKIN

IT'S AN unjust world, and right now there's probably no-one who knows that better than Damien Broderick*. Whilst bookstores make space to display infinitely less deserving hardcover mega-sellers, his brilliant comic novel Striped Holes is sitting in the modest paperback shelves of sf specialty bookshops. Because of this, an author is cheated of full earnings, Australian science fiction misses out on the guernsey it deserves, and the world is denied the good laugh it needs.

Back in the 20th century - "that peak epoch of nutrition-driven Brute Expressionism" - a time machine materialises in the living room of television presenter Sopwith Hammil and tells him what he must do to save the world. The time machine looks just like a two-metre loaf of sliced bread, wrapped in wax-paper, and its alien inhabitant looks like a slice of kibble bread (except that it sports a single blue eye). The alien has been seeking Sopwith Hammil, but only because it has confused him with Mark Hamill (of Stars Wars fame) -and the only reason it is crazy enough to have crossed time-space in quest of either Hammil is because its symbiotic computer has gone awry after watching Thorn Birds on television.

Meanwhile, back in the future, the woman Hsia Shan-yun - "a horrifyingly tall Valkyrie" who is more frankly described as "a pig" - is bravely fighting against a tyrannical civilisation of savage mechanoid bugs.

It's an outrageous, crazy plot, as deliberately sexist as Sir Les Patterson or Archie Bunker. Witness this account of hapless Mariette Planck:

Those ankles | They could have supported a fairly sturdy bank building, but the legs would not have held it far enough off the ground to satisfy the council building inspectors.

The face on her | Like an exploded pumpkin.

Teeth like tree stumps | Bum as big as all outdoors ...

The sexism is not objectionable; it is a controlled aspect of the novel's witty game-playing. Hsia Shan-yun is described with loving loathing; the author drools over the insults heaped upon her, and every disdainful word is tasted and savoured before it is used. She is the butt of a stylish, cultivated "sexism," a tirade of abuse prompted by the fact that she counts as a person. Sopwith Hammil, by contract, is a blandly plastic non-person, his world-saving efforts far less effectual than those of the despised female.

Broderick also plays with the devices of contemporary comic presentation. Douglas Adams adopts the pose of the droll, cynical, all-knowing auteur, and Woody Allen (for example) projects a cringingly neurotic persona. Broderick toys with both poses, but ultimately reveals a fundamental "true self" which is that of a struggling Aussie author trying to take on the weight of the northern hemisphere. With Hammil living in an Australian city and choosing to fly Australian Airlines, the author finds himself constantly explaining or defending Down Under to his audience: "Not everyone lives in London or Los Angeles," he protests.

Striped Holes is absolutely marvellous: witty, provocative, and charged with a relish for the sound and sense of language.

Striped Holes is set in a world just recognisably our own, but Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters, the sixth of a series, is set in the magical fantasy realm of Discworld. Curiously, Pratchett's abandonment of reality doesn't get him very far. The Discworld cosmology, for example, involves a star-turtle bearing on its back the four giant elephants which carry on their shoulders the mass of the Discworld; it's said that there's probably nowhere else in the universe where an elephant has to cock a leg to let the sun go past. Okay, that's funny - but it's hardly an example of searing originality.

The same is true of Duke Felmet, who has nothing to do all day but exercise his droit de seigneur. Trouble is, he hasn't got one. He doesn't quite know what it is and no-one will explain it to him, but he's pretty sure it's some kind of large hairy dog.

King Verence is monarch of Lancre, and, more importantly, he's dead. Waking in heaven to see his body lying on the ground with a dagger in its back, Verence has trouble adapting to death and finds the afterlife dull and boring. Readers may say the same about the humour. Is it really side-splitting to be told that Verence guessed his new-found pal was a ghost because he carried his head under his arm?

Whilst Broderick offers elaborately constructed verbal tricks woven into a careful pattern of allusion, parody, and comic inventiveness, Pratchett's wit can amount to little more than a wise-crack:

On nights such as this, witches are abroad.

Well, not actually abroad. They don't like the food and you can't trust the water and the shamans always hog the deckchairs.

This is funny, but it's gratuitous. There's no point in saying that the double-take on the word "abroad" implies a narrator who writes from the hip and makes consequent mistakes; the novel simply doesn't sustain this kind of sophisticated literary interest. Wyrd Sisters may be buoyant and bright, burbling along at a good slick pace and brimming with easy-going humour, but to come to Pratchett after Broderick is like listening to Bob Hawke after Gough Whitlam.

* Perhaps it isn't such an unjust world. Since this review was written, Damien Broderick's Striped Holes has been pronounced winner of the 1989 Australian Science Fiction Achievement Award for book-length fiction.