Welcome to the Chaoskampf by Jane Flett review: 'a joyless bacchanal'
Telling the story of a New Orleans woman who leaves her abusive husband and runs away to Mexico with “a crew of degenerate filmmakers”, this dystopian novel puts the vile into juvenile, writes Stuart Kelly
In my salad days when I was green in judgment, I was much taken with a 1958 James Thurber cartoon with the caption “Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?” At the time I was at college in Oxford, where we had a reputation for radicalism – even I, heaven forfend, was wearing oxblood Doc Martens – and a fellow student made quite the stir by standing for the Presidency of the Junior Common Room under the slogan “Be a rebel: wear a blazer”. (He won: an odd foreshadowing from 1991). Such recollections came to mind reading Jane Flett’s sophomore novel. Welcome To The Chaoskampf positively yearns to be transgressive and ends up being confused, boring and stereotypical. There is a quite a lot which might be filed under the “choked on marmalade” section of Sunday newspapers, but – you have been warned – the vaginal fisting begins on page 12.
The book is nominally divided into three parts – New Orleans, USA (the USA itself seems superfluous), then “The Homestead” in Mexico, then a return to New Orleans. That the third part is also subtitled an epilogue, and is only five pages long, is indicative of the book’s wider problems. It is a book which tries to challenge dichotomies and ends up – to quote Joanna Kavenna’s recent novel, Seven, and its paradoxical “box philosophy” – unable to be “Thinking Outside The Box About Thinking Outside The Box”.
Our protagonist – the word heroine would be wrong on very many levels – is Marcy, a Glaswegian now living a pampered life in America which she hates. She fell in with her now husband after an alleyway fumble, and is surreptitiously preventing what he really wants: for her to be pregnant. She is also a former boxer, and a strange wound has appeared on her body. The imagery – woman as void, as cavity – is somewhat overplayed. But – luckily? – Marcy falls in with a “group of degenerate film-makers”. In one of the book’s few cultural references she says “If I thought about it too hard, I’d realize I’d stepped into some f***ed-up Clockwork Orange reality.” AL Kennedy’s most recent novel, Alive In The Merciful Country, also featured a kind of Merry Prankster-esque collective, the “UnRule OrKestrA”, although it was markedly more gentle if equally compromised.
Marcy is rescued from her abusive marriage and heads to the commune in Mexico, overseen by the self-consciously mysterious Mutti. Some of her new friends are convinced her stigmata-like wound is a sign she is the Chosen One, who will usher in a slightly sleazier version of the Age of Aquarius. Mutti’s theology is roughly based around Mesopotamia and the figure of Tiamat, the primordial serpent (and, as some readers may remember, the silly adversary in the cartoon Dungeons and Dragons). There is a remnant of Tiamat in the OId Testament, both in the sea-monster Leviathan in the book of Job, and in the tohu va-vohu, the “formless void” of Genesis 1:2, memorably rendered by Robert Alter as “welter and waste”.
I shall let Flett’s own words explain the purpose of all this: “ ‘But here’s the thing. Capitalism is a c***. You know that, right?’ Of course I knew it. Capitalism was a lot of things and all of them f***ers. A black boot on the neck. A husband with nine tenths of the power balance. ‘The c***iest’. ” Marcy slowly twigs that if you want to move away from dichotomies, it cannot be done by simply “reversing the polarity” – but frankly, you could have got that point by watching The Two Ronnies’ wretched 1980s serial The Worm That Turned. The revelation is: “I can’t stop seeing all the ways it’s the same old shit. Like it really makes a difference whether it’s some man telling we what to do or it’s Mutti. Like all this matriarchal crap isn’t just another way for cis girls to claim they’re superior”. But – here’s the rub – cis/trans is another binary. The trap snaps back. The conclusion is a vaguely sentimental sense that only personal relationships can be fulfilling if not revolutionary. It strikes me as absurd that although the neologism “Chaoskampf” is glossed, with “kampf” translated as struggle, no-one in the novel seems to realise it’s also the title of a book by a certain prominent Nazi. The young these days!
References within books are often clues. In this, although the references to literature are scant, Marcy and her abusive husband do visit an exhibition of the work of Carolee Schneemann (also mentioned in the acknowledgments). Schneemann is an interesting figure, whom I only knew through Katy Hessel’s A History Of Art Without Men. I would much rather have read a book on Scheemann. But her appearance is a kind of wink: that this is a novel for those and such and those. She is there as a kind of shibboleth. Unlike a work such as James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, there is no attempt to explain, persuade or seduce. The reader is just confronted with a joyless bacchanal with no peril. Frankly, it puts the vile into juvenile.
I forgot to mention it also has cannibalism. Seriously, watch Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover or read Shalom Auslander’s Mother For Dinner instead.
Welcome To The Chaoskampf, by Jane Flett, Doubleday, £18.99
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