BOOKS

Rip It Up, Issue 232, 1 December 1996, Page 10

BOOKS

THE SPIN Anonymous (Hodder Moa Beckett: paperback) Oh, wee! A fast-paced, raw-boned, gun-totin’ New Zealand political novel. A book so hot its author can’t be revealed for fear- of meeting a couple of sinister SIS men one night on the back road and ending up sleeping with the fishes. Yeah, there’s dirt to dish in Wellington, and Anonymous is the person to deal it... . The problem is in the last statement: unfortunately for all the would be thrill-makers, there isn’t that much dirt to dish in Wellington; even if there was, most of us don’t give a shit about it. Based around an election campaign and the spin-doctoring antics of Ben Bradshaw, the PM’s press adviser, The Spin is packed with either cumbersome rip-offs of our own pol proles (the PM is a big-nosed, whisky drinking Scotsman), or cardboard characters without a hand up the back of the shirt to prop them up — this applies to all the characters who aren’t immediately recognisable as politicians. Still, The Spin is a great exercise in marketing and timing, getting this baby out while the scrubbed, ready faces of the leaders (not forgetting terms like ‘spin doctor’) are still.fresh in our minds; and for us Wellingtonians, there is a certain amount of wankers’ buzz which occurs when the rustling of our own winds are brought to paper in such a (wannabe) explicit light. Primary Colours it is not, but as a comparison of the importance and excitement of both political worlds it’s quite close. Perhaps there’s another reason why the author wishes to remain anonymous? \ t ' / JESSE GARON POPCORN r Ben Elton (Simon & Schuster: hardback) Aside from breaking the title in half for a plot projection of Ben Elton’s thinly comic fourth novel, one could think of it as 24 hours worth of Oliver Stone’s worst nightmare. With a plot featuring an unhealthy amount of thinly disguised Natural Born Killers scenarios, and expanded to take that film’s surrounding copycat murder debate to its most feared conclusion, seems it may be time for Oliver Stone to file a copycat suit of his own. For argument’s sake, let’s say the book’s main character, Bruce Delamitri, plays Oliver Stone with his social conscience surgically removed (indeed, some would argue this is an operation Stone has already undergone). To be fair to Stone, his output has been more varied than Delamitri’s, whose has always been on a bloody climb towards the film he has just won the Best Director Oscar for, Ordinary Americans. To further flesh out the argument, let’s say Bruce’s Number 1 fans, white trash ‘Mall Murderers’ Wayne and Scout, play Mickey and Mallory — only they in turn have some scripts to steal to help blaze their trail of mayhem. The media pick up on this connection as Wayne and Scout close in on their hero, in a vain hope he will save them from the chair by claiming responsibility for their actions. Pretty soon the viewers at home are dictating the outcome of this live-to-air siege with their remote controls. Instead of art imitating life, life is imitating art, and people are

literally dying for it. “I didn’t start it and I didn’t kill anyone. I just hold up the mirror,” Delamitri argues prior to his life collapsing. “Rather a flattering mirror isn’t it?,” a professor who is to clever to have to worry about cred preservation tells him. . Oh, yes. It’s all a jolly big hoot until someone claims you falsified the reflection, right? And what if you’re reflecting a reflection, as Elton seems to be doing? Try holding up a mirror to a mirror a few times yourself. Each time the image gets a little smaller — loses a degree of its impact. Popcorn’s a quick read, but like the snack food it takes its name from, not a comparatively satisfying one. I would rather have spent 40 minutes watching it in the form of a Comic Strip parody than the eight hours I did reading it as a novel. BRONWYN TRUDGEON SHOOTING ELVIS RM Eversz (Picador: paperback) ‘I never saw my family depicted on billboards, in television commercials, magazine advertisements.. . Why did I have a silent, absent and angry pop? And my mom, where was her chance at leisurely tennis afternoons? Why was it our kitchen never sparkled?... I wanted my share of those perfect billboard moments of life.’

; While accidentally becoming a terrorist may not be the perfect way to achieve the above, one thing it will get you is noticed, as the newly created Nina Zero discovers after her previous persona, meek and mild Mary Alice, accidentally blows up LAX Airport. One of her earliest reactions, for better and worse, is not only to get mad at the rat-assed boyfriend who helped set her up for the crime, but also to get even. Mary Alice trades her good daughter look for Nina Zero’s designedly more street one, but it’s when she moves in with a painter and an amateur video maker who the look fails to fool that the story’s greedy heart is really revealed. The greed is not only for material possession, but possession of the very self, be it .taken by means sexual or violent — often both at the same time. Life is just one big tradeable, fuckable commodity in the eyes of those Nina encounters — from the detectives at the agency she joins, to the TV movie producer the latter of Nina’s room-mates wants to sell her story to. The bones of some heady ideas are boiling at the heart of the tale, but often in a way self-con-sciously enough to have them sticking in your craw. A link between abuse and dependency, the way the power of fame can sap the power of the famous, why the past is always a more than equal match for any runner trying to outdistance it, and the old ‘it’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees’ are just some of the concepts attempting to turn this into a detective novel in which not only the case, but human nature itself provide the mysteries to be charted. It doesn’t pack quite the wallop one gets the feeling it wants to, but should make a sassy enough read for anyone happy to take the style over substance road to literary fulfilment. ■ -

BRONWYN TRUDGEON