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(More customer reviews)Having arrived late on the Nick Cave bandwagon, I spent several years listening closely to his albums and finally decided it was time to take a crack at the book to which there are many allusions in his music. For example, Crow Jane, a character from one of Cave's most violent songs, is re-introduced here as the vile woman who whelped the hapless narrator, Euchrid Eucrow. So first I read the reviews, and then I tackled the actual book itself.
Is "And The Ass Saw The Angel" hard to read? Yes. Are there made-up words? Yes. But then there are many novels, great and not so great, that are both hard to read and that contain many seeming nonsense words and phrases. On reading Cave, I think of Faulkner (made-up places and words), Flannery O'Connor (particularly the parallels with her novel Wise Blood), and of H. P. Lovecraft, whose novels and short stories are packed with the kind of degenerates who people Cave's Ukulore Valley. Many of the words that Cave uses, and may be accused by some of inventing, are not inventions at all but rather are either obscure or archaic words. Some of the actually invented words are agglutinations of two or three real words, so put together as to make more vivid the idea being expressed. Cave is obviously a master wordsmith and his command of English demands a similar level of erudition from his readers. One of those hefty dictionaries seen in university libraries just might be needed by some.
The story itself is populated by all the lowest, most degenerate and filthy specimens of humanity imaginable. Narrator Euchrid Eucrow, born mute, is himself the unwholesome and wretched spawn of diseased loins. It is telling that the Ukulore Valley's most sympathetic characters are the town whore and the daughter she bore in death.
The Ukulites themselves are above the others at the start, the God-chosen masters of the valley. Hard-working, God-fearing, and sober, only they have a real future there and a stake in the status quo. Everyone else is there to be used when needed, but officially ignored otherwise. I don't know about other readers, but though this novel is putatively set somewhere in the American South, I detect a whiff of Brigham Young and the Mormons about the Ukulites story. Cave knows his Bible, and this book is replete with Biblical quotations and allusions.
I don't want to ruin the story by telling it here, but suffice to say it is a brutal, bloody, filthy, vulgar and sometimes hilarious mockery of bigotry and religious zealotry. Euchrid, rejected and abused by all and sundry because of his origins and his condition, retreats into the confines of his ramshackle, jerry-built Kingdom of Doghead and plots revenge on all who have made his life sheer misery. How it all ends is a comic surprise.
And The Ass Saw The Angel is not a bad literary debut for a man best known as a songwriter. The story and the language betray Cave's longtime fascination with the American South. And this is where it really loses a star. Cave tries to make his characters sound "southern" by having the narrator (Euchrid Eucrow) say words like "ah", mah" and "unnerstand" in place of proper English enunciation, but then he often forgets that mid-sentence and lapses into Standard English or sometimes even lets loose with a bit of Aussie slang! Cave or his editors should have been more careful. But though the book is filled with graphic descriptions of human and animal cruelty of the basest sort, intrepid readers who are not literal-minded may find this to be a very engrossing novel noir indeed. Four bright stars and may Cave write soon again!
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