Rabid messiah for a virtual world

A quest for authenticity drives Chuck Palahniuk's fast, funny and furious Rant, says M John Harrison
Rant by Chuck Palahniuk


by Chuck Palahniuk

319pp, Jonathan Cape, £12.99

Two pages before it begins, Chuck Palahniuk's eighth novel is already asking you if you wish you'd never been born. You'd better concentrate, because by the time you get to the end, that's an important question. Also, if Palahniuk starts before the beginning it's because he has so much to tell you and so many entertaining ways to tell it. He can't wait to get to it. He can't wait to start speaking. Actually, Rant is less a novel than an oral history, which, as he puts it himself, may or may not mean a history of the inside of someone's mouth.

We're in a near future, or, more likely, an alternative present. Buster "Rant" Casey is easily bored. In addition he has a toxic sense of humour, a nose as sensitive as any dog's, and a permanent case of mutated rabies contracted from the childhood habit of sticking his arm down animals' dens for the fun of being bitten. Being bitten wakes him up. It gives him a boner. By adolescence, Casey has passed on the Lyssavirus to most of his contemporaries in Middleton - a place "four solid days of driving" away from anywhere - and destroyed the local economy through a bizarre form of speculation involving children's teeth. They pay him to leave, and he ends up in the big city, where he falls into the subculture of "party crashing", a leisure form of the road traffic accident. One or two nights a week, party crashers put on odd and flamboyant clothes, decorate their cars in surreal ways and stalk one another through the streets. The idea is to ram. Part of the fun is to pretend for the rubberneckers that you're a real accident, with plenty of hysteria and death threats over the exchange of insurance details.

Echo Lawrence, Shot Dunyun and Neddy Nelson are "regular people watching their lives squeezed down into dollars", people "filling up the hundred years of every boring day". If they weren't party crashing, they'd be "peak boosting" - sitting in a room alone, with their brains plugged into a recording of six hours of someone else's experiences. If nothing else, party crashing gets them out of the house; even on a boring night they are at least bored in company with other people. Like any risk sport, it's a finger in the face of the increasing virtualisation of the world. But it's still only a sport, a "cathartic release for antisocial and anti-authoritarian impulses", and that's not quite real enough for Casey, who, having bitten or licked or had oral sex with enough of his new friends to become the Typhoid Mary of rabies, straps a Christmas tree to the top of his car one night, sets it on fire, then drives off a bridge and into urban mythology.

Friends and relatives, childhood neighbours, traffic reports and sociology journals are left behind to make the myth. We receive the story of Casey's "self-directed road rage" as fragments, fractured anecdotes about other things. The survivors contradict one another, as you would expect. Facts are disputed. Accounts are challenged. Palahniuk is careful not to allow the reader to become too disoriented or debilitated by this. "The stories about Rant," Echo Lawrence says, "we each had to piece them together out of details we each had to dig up from the basement of the basement of the basement of our brains." Meanwhile, her friend Henry Green wonders whether they aren't inventing their hero anyway: "he became this fantastic tale we could recount about our reckless Party Crashing past ... bathed in the flare of his gasoline limelight, we would appear mythic by association."

What emerges from their testimony is a sustained attack on the contemporary blanching and monetisation of mythology. After his gleeful destruction of the Middleton economy, for instance, Casey moves on to the enfeebled rituals of Halloween, substituting real for fake - eyeballs, blood, internal organs - to keep the eight-year-olds interested. "What bothered Rant," testifies party crasher Shot Dunyun, "was the fake, the bullshit nature of everything." But the reason why Casey can be so certain of that, the reason he can be so calm and determined in the face of his own rabid progress through the world, Palahniuk reserves until the end of the novel, in a twist as complex as it is bizarre. A flyover-state messiah, caught between history - or in this case time - and self-interest, Casey can afford to be more gnomic than his followers. It's always rush hour somewhere, he believes: "Life's greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you."

Rant is fast and true, savagely clearsighted and intelligent, a luxury to read, and so funny that your facial muscles soon tire. But it can be rather like eating cake. At first you think this is the best cake you've ever eaten, you never want to stop eating it; then you've eaten too much and you never want to taste it again. The reason is structural. However breathtaking his ability to organise - his cunningly welded syntagms stolen from every medium, every category of fiction and nonfiction - Palahniuk has too many ideas. The Typhoid Mary of the Lyssavirus is one story; the culture of party crashing is another; the sci-fi notion of "peak boosting" draws the reader's attention away from both. Rant is less a novel than a book of possible novels, or set-ups for novels, interspersed with the raw research for the set-ups of possible novels. It's much more coherent than some of his previous work - Survivor, for instance - but remains suffused with the same west coast lunacy. Rant is the novel you might expect if Philip K Dick met Dennis Johnson and they took crystal meth together and spent a week telling one another everything they knew about epidemiology, economics, cars, coin-collecting, generation warfare, spiders and the physics of time.

· M John Harrison's Nova Swing (Gollancz) has won the 2007 Arthur C Clarke award

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