Book review: Consumed, by David Cronenberg
This debut novel by movie director David Cronenberg is in part a dramatic catalogue of highly desirable electronics equipment. Globetrotting freelance journalists Nathan and Naomi are always thinking about and fiddling with their cameras, and lusting after ones they don't yet own. ("The new D4, the one he didn't have, could shoot at a surreal ISO 204,800.")
by David Cronenberg
4th Estate
This debut novel by movie director David Cronenberg is in part a dramatic catalogue of highly desirable electronics equipment. Globetrotting freelance journalists Nathan and Naomi are always thinking about and fiddling with their cameras, and lusting after ones they don't yet own. ("The new D4, the one he didn't have, could shoot at a surreal ISO 204,800.")
The protagonists' acquisitive desire for the latest gadgets is part of the novel's pungent stew of themes punning on the book's title: consumerism, in the sense of wanting to shop, but also cannibalism, and "consumption" as an odd new disease, rather than its historical meaning of tuberculosis.
Aficionados of Cronenberg's cinematic work will not be surprised to find exquisitely detailed, voyeuristic body horror in his novel: people's physical parts are exposed, wired up, or cut off in carefully lit scenes, always being filmed or photographed by the characters.
At the centre of the plot is a French celebrity-philosopher couple in their 60s, Aristide and Celestine Arosteguy. They are known for seducing (and sharing) their students and writing neo-Marxian denunciations of commodity culture. But now Aristide has fled, accused of killing and then eating bits of his devoted wife. Naomi follows his trail to Tokyo, where he tells her: "I expect soon to feel the Hannibal Lecter resonances."
Meanwhile, Nathan meets a Hungarian surgeon, Dr Molnar, who photographs his patients while they are drugged and exhibits the resulting art in a neighbourhood restaurant. Nathan has sex with Molnar's doomed patient Dunja, who says things like: "While I'm still alive, I'll have nothing special left to seduce with except the scent of dying." She gives Nathan a sexually transmitted disease long thought extinct, so he travels to the US to meet the disease's discoverer, Dr Roiphe, whose daughter has picked up some strange habits from a sojourn in Paris. Roiphe wants to collaborate on a book with Nathan, with the title "Consumed".