Jimmy Currin
Unspeakable Secrets Of The Aro Valley, by Danyl McLauchlan
(Victoria University Press, 2013), 400 pp., $35.
There are, it is certain, unspeakable secrets locked away in Wellington’s Aro Valley – dark pools of reflection that few dare to stare into too deeply. New Zealand is a country deathly afraid of its own (considerable) darkness, yet, profoundly titillated by its sensational exposition at several removes. But the ‘secrets’ I refer to are not crimes. They are movies. Worse, they are artistically inclined movies, and far worse, they are powerfully stark and truthful movies about people just getting by – getting by a weekend, a relationship, a depression that seems like it may never let up. Not very sexy, it’s true, but I’ve never been to a viewing of Campbell Walker’s movies (and he was not the only interesting Aro-based filmmaker of recent times) where the audience hasn’t – after a period of stunned silence – wanted to talk about how they knew these characters, or were them. Probably his best Aro film, Why Can’t I Stop This Uncontrollable Dancing, is mentioned in one local film bible, but although it had a recent – single – showing in Wellington you would be hard-pressed to see it, ever.
So, cue haplessly outdated screed about some art being good for you and other art being McArt, blah blah blah? Hold your horses. Campbell Walker warrants a mention here not in order to blandly compare artworks that reference ‘the Aro’; no, Danyl McLauchlan has invited the issue by naming one of his main characters Campbell Walker, not by accident. Since the main character’s name is Danyl, and the main character’s best mate seems to be named after one of McLauchlan’s best mates, I confess I spent the entire reading time wondering if there was some subtle point being made. Because the character named Campbell Walker is an utterly unredeemable turd of a man, misguided and megalomaniacal in everything he does, even down to calling himself The Campbell Walker. So why choose Campbell Walker as the source, when some of the other names derive from real people? Why not Campbell Jones, or Campbell Smith? Part of me became the dumbly conspiracy-obsessed protagonist of the novel, wondering what the game was. What number were this obviously deluded ‘Danyl’ and buddies trying to pull?
Because this is not an realistic examination of city-dwellers’ lives. It is a non-stop action-conspiracy-occult-thriller. Everything in it, is taken at the sensational remove alluded to above: occultism, science, secretive weirdos… um, women, which is an approach you won’t really find in a Campbell Walker film. Was this McLauchlan’s psycho-retroactive method of smearing everything that he was not as an artist? But surely I was taking things too far, an absurdly political view of what is more likely some kind of ‘secret’ joke?
Which, as it turns out, is closer to the truth. McLauchlan and Walker are friends, and Walker apparently likes the book, as well as being utterly unprecious about the depiction of his namesake (he is, in fact, an approachable, witty, erudite gentleman).
But if you thought I was building this argument to an apotheosis, an observation on the way some arts are buried once they make it clear that they mean business, while other, lighter expressions are given the tap on the shoulder as true cultural documents, then the mild air of deflation should inform you of the sensation I had reading Unpeakable Secrets…
Over the past few decades of international literary production, increasing sophistication and cultural cross-fertilization have turned a lot of purported genre writing into games of Juggle The Genre, Hide The Genre, or Kick The Genre. The requirements of real genre fiction, however remain untalked about but specific. My mother still enjoys her Mills & Boon, but never says anything about what she gets out it; and I’d probably rather not know. McLauchlan is in the postmodern camp of wanting it a few different ways. He obviously enjoys the buzz that the sex and topsy-turvydom provide, just like any good thriller. But he’s also aware that he’s not writing for a true genre audience, and so must introduce twists to the formula. Remarkably, his book most closely resembles the approach of a series of recent films.
I quite like those movies starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost – Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz, Paul, and so on. They realise that, to be modern men, we can’t just churn out the same old bang bang, bleed bleed nonsense. We want the vicarious thrills of genre, but we also want to show that we know it’s kind of dumb. So they pack their films with wound-up versions of every genre cliché, and right next to it, wound-up versions of every cliché related to genre geekdom. Which is probably why the movies seem three times as speedfreaked as an ordinary action film: so many boxes to tick, so little time. Their strength is in getting the clichés exactly right, and by delivering them with genial charisma. The contradictions pile up so stealthily that anyone who pays attention to culture has to laugh – even it’s bitter laughter. Moreover, they have by such wiles cleverly upended the identification process for the audience. You’re not watching an action flick thinking, god, wish I was that guy. You’re thinking, wow, they know what it’s like to be me, a hero and a goof all at once.
Danyl and his buddy Steve operate something like this in the book, but I found it difficult to get involved in their goofiness because, unlike the aforementioned movies, their antics were not always specifically grounded in the story and the genre aura of each particular moment. Instead they were discursive, which puts you in the difficult position of having to like, or at least be interested in, the characters, in order to care about the particular way that they dropped something, or how their pants were riding at a certain moment, or the specific details of how they repeatedly fell over. None of which is contributing to the story such as one is trying to understand it: it’s just noise, inducing a welling sense of frustration and, catastrophically for the mystery elements in the tale, a cessation of caring about any of it.
One of those dire truisms of the theatre — show, don’t tell — let the audience work out the subtexts themselves in their own time — might have better served McLauchlan as a motto in the building of a narrative: more actual substance, less funny stuff referring to the substance, or not even doing that. The antics in Unspeakable Secrets… certainly have their amusing side. McLauchlan is capable of creating and framing a strong image, and he maintains an energetic clarity to the flow of the book, even as it jumps back and forth through time for most of the 400 pages. But ultimately they don’t allow true immersion into what could have been a very workable, rollicking yarn about Satanists, science, angry women — all that good genre stuff.
You may say that it has the eager superfluity of many a first novel, trying to do too much. But eagerness, in writing a mystery, seems at odds with requirements. Part of the appeal of a Satanic thriller by Denis Wheatley comes not out of closely-elaborated characters, but in how the aura of the story invades and entangles a lot of broad-brush ones. Everyone is implicated, touched by the dread of things out of sight — or else hidden in plain view. In Secrets…, everyone’s a bit too comic, and the inducements and fixations driving the characters don’t attain the gravitas they need for full reader investment. This may be, in part, McLauchlan’s point — the subversion of genre expectations — but I’d argue that you need to get the effect right before you start upending it.
As a text, Secrets… shares a number of surface traits — somewhat dim buddy protagonists, science gone mad, a what-is-real subtext — with Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, a book which is absurdly funny. But O’Brien’s humour isn’t just about skits: O’Brien created a recognisable cartoon – a genre representation, if you will – of bog Ireland, through whose prism many real and many ridiculous things could be rendered: about Ireland, about the march of the modern world over the rural, as well as about the type of self-justifications that one sees the typical Danyl McLauchlancharacter indulging in. O’Brien’s aim was to the heart of matters, and he did it in half the amount of pages as McLauchlan uses. What the aim of Unspeakable Secrets Of The Aro Valley is – as writing in and around New Zealand, as genre, or even as any kind of straightforward entertainment – is not quite so readily perceptible.
JIMMY CURRIN is a theatre director, actor and playwright, and musician. He played the lead in a recent Campbell Walker film. He writes about performance for Point magazine and lives in Dunedin.
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