babylon [pelevin]

What is Russia? Is it a country? Is it a state of mind? Is it a race? At a time when “Russia”, the idea of ‘Russia’ is being bandied about like a tennis ball being chased by a dog on a beach, all we truly discern is the degree of ignorance possessed about the word itself. When you’re swimming in a sea of ignorance, that is when literature can come to your assistance. No work of literature can disclose the truth about the country it emerges from, but it can help to offer some insight, at the very least. Given this, there’s no better time to read Pelevin. In the nineties, a new wave of post-Soviet writers emerged (see also Sorokin and Prilepin) who sought to capture within their writing the course their country was taking. The results are delirious, terrifying, wackily entertaining and frequently appear to be nonsensical. In other words, more than a bit like Trump-world.

There is, of course, a strand of US literature that foreshadows this. The Pynchon-Acker-Burroughs strand (there will be others who escape me). In this sense, the two sprawling superpowers have more, culturally in common, perhaps, than we tend to realise. This is a world of drugs and conspiracies and naked power. Throw in the Babylonians and you start to get a handle on Pelelvin’s early novel. It tells the story of Babe Tatarsky, (a Pynchonian name if ever there was one). Tatarsky is a no-mark who finds himself working as an advertising copywriter during the Yeltsin years, when every two-bit criminal is hoping to become the next oligarch. Boris Berezovsky appears in the novel and there are doubtless dozens of other specific references; this is a book rooted in the Moscow which formed Putin and his clique. 

Pelevin follows Tatarsky as he makes his way up the greasy pole. Clients are both dangerous and endangered. All of them have criminal ties, but their life-spans are brief, as one after another is bumped off by the next man down. The copywriter’s adverts are brilliant; the objective is not so much to promote the brand as to explode it into public consciousness. The more depraved the advertising idea, the better. This is anarcho-terrorism-capitalism. (Sound familiar?) In a state of perpetual chaos, the consumer’s attention is all that counts, and nothing but the most outrageous, obscene idea will gain their attention. Truth and falsehood are ideas which are left behind. Survival and power are all that matter.

In the meantime Tatarsky is visited by the ghost of Che Guevara who offers a neo-buddhist propaganda doctrine (As someone points out to Tatarsky, the Spanish word for advertising is ‘propaganda’). He also takes copious amounts of magic mushrooms and hangs out with Chechen terrorists. Gradually, by a process of default, rather than any cunning plan, he finds himself being promoted up a nebulous Masonic chain, until he finally assumes the position of propagandist-in-chief. 

At one point, Tatarsky’s role is “senior creative in the kompromat department”. The chaos that it would appear Putin’s mandate has succeeded in unleashing globally was something that was being perfected back in the nineties in Russia. Babylon describes a state which is so unhinged it can only be managed through the intercession of a cult. If Pelevin’s novel is any guide as to how that played itself out, expect more ‘American carnage’ sooner rather than later. 

the helmet of horror [pelevin]

There's approximately half a dozen characters. Each one is trapped in an identical room. Each room opens onto a maze, each maze taking its own distinctive format. The characters have a computer each, and they communicate with one another on a message board. They have names like Organizm, UGLI 666, and Monstradamus. A censor edits any personal information relating to their life beyond the prison. Fairly quickly, they work out they're in some kind of maze, liable to be confronted by some kind of Minatour. Who will be wearing a Helmet of Horror. Which affects everyone's perception, including the reader's. At some point the Minatour makes an appearance and then leaves, having hurt no-one. Theseus also appears briefly.

Pelevin's novel was apparently commissioned as part of a series on myths. It has a great deal of Pelevinesque flair. There's discussions of what I believe is called phenomenology; mazes within Gothic cathedrals; myth and much more. There's also a beguiling reference to the Guardian Unlimited website, testament to the writer's globalised consciousness, which is allowed free rein within a virtual world. Perhaps he envisioned this as a virtual book. If so, it would appear to be virtual in so far as it is not quite whole; for this reader it was certainly no more than virtually understandable. Nevertheless, it's an enjoyable, skimpy read, and again, in a nod to the cyber-world, the reader finds him or herself surfing the cyber-chat the book consists of, some of it making sense, some of it making non-sense. Perhaps if you know your greek myths better than my rudimentary knowledge it would knit together more coherently, but it might also be that you can't read the Helmet of Horror with any degree of confidence of knowing what's really occurring unless you have degrees in astro-physics, particle Buddhism and Bishop Berkeley. Like, no doubt, the prankster Pelevin himself.

omon ra [w. pelevin]

Omon Ra tells the story of a young man, Omon, who finds himself realising his dream of being recruited into the Soviet space program. However, he discovers, during training, that the mission he's been sent on is a suicidal one-way journey to the dark side of the Moon, a fate he is obliged to embrace for the greater good of the Republic. Omon is the callow narrator, who talks us through his trials and tribulations with a flat, underwhelmed tone, one shared by his fellow kamikaze astranouts, with the exception of a brief discussion about the best songs of Pink Floyd.

This is Pelevin's first novel. Whilst the scale and ambition is evident, the piece lacks the assurance of The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, and Pelevin's prose style is, at times, as tentative as his narrator's disposition. Even at a mere 150 pages, it feels as though Omon is crawling towards his demise, rather than hurtling through space.

Nevertheless, the ideas on display are rich, not least the remarkable sequence which describes a hunting trip undertaken by Kissinger when in Russia on a diplomatic mission. Pelevin's imagination seems to be bursting to break through the confines of the Soviet-era setting, something it perhaps achieves in the book's closing sequences, when the narrative accelerates into the unexpected, with a detour via Zabriskie Point.

It would be interesting to know what Pelevin considers to be his influences. The narrative of the book, dealing with an innocent being sent to his probable death in a rocket, resembles that of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Like Pynchon, Pelevin draws on an esoteric frame of reference, his erudition distilled through the perspective of a simple hero trying to do the right thing in difficult times. Whether Pelevin has come across Pynchon or not, he shares the other's sense of ambition, the notion that a novel needs to challenge the boundaries of realism in order to be able to discover a perspective from which any kind of originality can be articulated. Likewise, both have dwelt on the fact that nothing shows up the hubris of our era more than our pitiful ventures into space. Adventures which show how unadaptable man is as a species; and whose grandiose ambition only serves to reveal how parochial the systems which fuel these ambitions are, within a universe we can barely dip our toes in.

the sacred book of the werewolf [w. victor pelevin]

The heroine of this book is called A Hu-Li, a Chinese name for a Russian teenage prostitute who left China for Moscow at some point in the last thousand years. Translated into Russian, her name means, 'What the fuck'. A Hu-Li tells her this herself, as she is the book's narrator, and the text charts her journey, via a love affair with a werewolf, towards enlightenment, when she uses a BMX bike in a remote Moscow park to help propel her into the Nirvanic Rainbow Stream.

Pelevin's text is esoteric. Apart from being a treatise on the attainment of post-material enlightenment, (in the Zen Buddhist sense of that phrase), it also references, among other nodes in the contemporary zeitgeist, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, The Matrix, and Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood for Love. The narrator claims to have slept with Dostoyevsky and been an associate of Tolstoy. Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kant and Bishop Berkeley are all name-checked, and the book also offers a comprehensive interpretation of recent Russian history.

All of which might make The Sacred Book of the Werewolf sound like a worthy, academic read, which couldn’t be further from the truth. (Although the Zen Buddhism gets intense at certain points.) A Hu-Li, clearly some kind of a cover for the book’s maverick author, is witty, irreverent and ultimately kind-hearted. She kept me great company as I travelled through old Russia, never afraid of putting the world in front of my eyes into a context that made sense to someone who’d never been there before.

Pelevin’s agendas range all over the place. He critiques the evolution of the new Russian oligarchy, with its thirst for oil, whilst offering his readers simple readings of Buddhist aphorisms (eg What’s the difference between a dog and a lion watching a stick being thrown – the dog looks at the stick, the lion at the stick’s thrower.) It’s a blend that shouldn’t really work, yet its very unlikeliness allows Pelevin to pull it off, in much the same way that his narrator conjures men into believing they have enacted their wildest fantasies with her, when she’s actually been reading Hawking the whole time. Reading Pelevin is an, at times, dazzling experience. In the face of his and his narrator’s sardonic wit and eclectic intelligence, it might be expected that the book had traded in emotional power for intellectual mind-games. However, there’s a strong (ahuman) emotional narrative at work in A Hu-Li’s story. Attaining Buddhist enlightenment might not sound like a moving endgame for a novel, but by instituting this as the finale of A Hu-Li’s narrative, Pelevin manages to make it so. When you reach the end of the book and see how it connects with the beginning, something almost magical occurs. As if all this wasn’t enough, it also offers the most intriguing account of werewolf sex you’re ever likely to find.