Book reviews: Joe King’s apocalyptic The Fireman; Lily Collins reads Peter Pan; William S. Burroughs’ The Soft Machine
King (who’s actually Stephen King Jr) depicts a pandemic of spontaneous combustion, Collins makes a poor job of J. M. Barrie, and Ramiz Monsef sounds like Burroughs reading Burroughs
The Soft Machine
by William S. Burroughs (read by Ramiz Monsef)
Blackstone Audio (audiobook)
4/5 stars
The Soft Machine is notorious even within the notorious context of William S. Burroughs’ work. The successor to The Naked Lunch, it took that novel’s cut-up experimentalism and diced it through an even more intense blender. To such an extent that no one – Burroughs included – was entirely certain what The Soft Machine was. It has been published in various variations – the original sometimes called The Word Hoard, or as part of the broader Nova Trilogy. This is not a book you read for story. Inasmuch as one exists, it is a characteristic melange of Burroughsian paranoid arcana: secret agents, junkies, homosexuality, criss-crossing time and space. But the crazy paving sentences are what excite and challenge our narrator: “So I am a public agent and don’t know who I work for, get my instructions from street signs, newspapers and pieces of conversation I snap out of the air the way a vulture will tear entrails from other mouths.” Burroughs is one of the great reader-authors, his deadpan, sardonic drawl the perfect counterpart to his deadpan, sardonic writing. Ramiz Monsef’s basso profundo sounds similar without being an impersonation. His percussive rhythm works well, and if he can’t match Burroughs for humour Monsef goes with the chaos admirably.