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“Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey” by Chuck Palahniuk
Book Review by Mike Philbin
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| Book cover of “Rant” by Chuck Palahniuk. Image © Anchor |
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Buster (Rant) Casey, Echo Lawrence, Tina Something, Green Taylor Simms and others... What are they all doing in this “oral history” book? Party Crashing?
Historians? Time? Space? And the importance of poison. What's the
connection?
Well, it's funny, so all the reviews profess. Yes, it's funny-ish, hilarious
in parts, but that's not what makes this an unbelievable book.
It's Palahniuk's first SCIENCE FICTION novel. We all know that most of what
takes place in Palahniuk's books is akin to magical fiction at worst or
spiritual tattle tailing at best. It's another look through the dimensional
warp furnished by allegory and make-believe. Same here but more fixated with
a social order and more politically blatant than any other of the man's
works.
As far as its professed science fictional element goes, it takes place in an
arbitrary future that might have resulted when some doofus politician made a
few radical changes to the way the entire modern world works last week. It's
that future that the inhabitants of “Rant” occupy; that reckless, that
horrific.
It's not a traditional reading book where you systematically work through
three acts to some convoluted arbitrary conclusion like thrillers or murder
mysteries. In this book each and every personal revelation re-convolutes and
re-configures its own identity. Onion skins, that'd be the way to describe
this narrative form. Instead of story being unravelled, people are
unravelled; literally frame by frame each characteristic of you is analysed
by someone who's not you. You see yourself through the many translations of
yourself via this complex group matrix.
and then you find out how the world's wired...
and then you find out that all the people in rant's car are....
and then you find out the rant's girlfriend is...
and it just continues on and on...
Page after page is littered with three or four short “testimonies” from the
fifty or so characters in the book. My personal favourite is Echo Lawrence,
who goes on about the taste of certain venereal diseases: syphilis tastes
like curried chicken, hepatitis tastes like veal with capers, HIV like
buttered popcorn, most forms of cancer taste like tartar sauce.
Then, on page 114, a chapter called “Boosted Peaks” is devoted entirely to a
radical new global entertainment medium, it's a really wild ride that's just
sat there in the middle of the book like some crazy side street hobo action
you might drive by and thank the lord you weren't fished in. It goes on for
seven pages about the psycho-technical aspects of... well, you'll have to
read it to see.
But it's also about 9/11 and the War on Terror—it's a fairly simple
juxtaposition to see how the Emergency Health Powers Act is actually the
Patriot Act and rabies is blatant iconography for the terrorist threat. And
more than being a book about the sordid exploits of a ruthless serial
killer, it's a book about deceit; a strangely Cold War novel of omission and
revelation.
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(4.5/5) By Mike Philbin
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