Winner of the Crimefest 2012 Goldsboro Last Laugh Award Billy Karlsson needs to get real. Literally. A hospital porter with a sideline in euthanasia, Billy is a character trapped in the purgatory of an abandoned novel. Deranged by logic, driven beyond sanity, Billy makes his final stand: if killing old people won’t cut the mustard, the whole hospital will have to go up in flames. Only his creator … creator can stop him now, the author who abandoned Billy to his half-life limbo, in which Billy schemes to do whatever it takes to get himself published, or be damned . . .
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We writers of fiction often talk about our characters as if they’re real people. The characters talk to us; they misbehave when we try to make them do something they don’t want to; they change the plot or do things that surprise us. Given the high incidence of neurosis among us ink-stained wretches, this isn’t as alarming as it would be for, say, convenience-store clerks. But what if a character actually came alive… and had a bone to pick with the author?
That’s the setup for Absolute Zero Cool, Declan Burke’s fantasia on writing, health care, sociopathy, and explosives.
There are two point-of-view characters: a thinly-disguised Declan Burke, writer of serio-comic Irish crime novels; and Billy, who also goes by Karlsson, a character in one of The Author’s abandoned novels, who wants to reinvent himself and get the novel done so he can properly come alive. In that Billy has regular meetings with The Author and other people can see him, it would seem that he’s quite alive enough, but never mind that. The Author gets involved in the project against his better instincts and finishes the story — which happens to be about a sociopathic hospital porter who blows up his own hospital.
If you look up the definition of “meta” in Wiktionary, you’ll find a picture of this novel’s cover. The fictional Burke dishes on his own books, decries the state of modern publishing, and deals with a new child and an understandably skeptical wife. Billy decides he’d rather write part of his story himself, and does, trading editorial notes (more usually, barbs), with The Author. Karlsson (the version of Billy that The Author created and whom Billy wants to reform) is writing his own novel, Sermo Vulgis, which reads like Henry Miller on crack, and which Billy and The Author criticize. Somewhere in all of this there’s a plot of sorts (Billy/Karlsson’s plotting to demolish the hospital in the service of a constantly shifting portfolio of complaints and ideologies) that The Author and Billy also criticize; their changes end up in the parts of the novel that we follow as Billy’s in-novel POV.
Does any of that make sense to you? If it does, are you ready for 238 pages of it? If so, here’s your book. Enjoy.
If you stop trying to make sense of it all and just go with it, the story is pretty entertaining, even if it it does regularly threaten to become a literary ouroboros. Burke (both the real-world and in-book versions) has a mordant sense of humor and a gift for making even the oddest dialog sound real. You can hear the Irish lilt in the various narrative voices without descending into dialect. The character-as-a-real-person conceit is hardly unique (I can just imagine Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next popping up here) but Burke owns it. Billy becomes enough of a real person to help us forget he’s a literary device, grounding that we certainly can use.
Why only four stars? This is a book that’s easier to respect than to love; it’s audacious, sure, but you’ll never lose sight of the fact that Burke’s screwing with you on every page. You probably won’t come to like any of the characters. The crime plot regularly starts and stops as the characters take care of their postmodernist business. Karlsson’s novel-within-a-novel-within-a-novel is strange and disturbing, but not in a way that adds much to his character; even Billy and The Author debate whether to take it out, but unfortunately never do. Finally, the two major female characters never advance much past being scolds and wet blankets.
Absolute Zero Cool is a tour de force literary experiment loosely wrapped in a genre cloak. If you like your narratives deconstructed and self-referential, you’ll find much to enjoy here. If you’re looking for a straight-ahead Celtic crime novel with a proper plot and characters, look elsewhere (perhaps to one of Burke’s other novels).