Mark Brandi’s Rip

Mark Brandi, The Rip (Hachette Australia 2019)

I’m on holiday, and this was a birthday present. I knew from the start that it wasn’t my cup of tea. The cover is clever. Jock Serong’s back cover blurb makes me ashamed. He says:

What held me close in this novel was not the idea of a hidden population of drifters and addicts, but the writer’s reassurance that dignity and small kindnesses have a place in that world.

It makes me ashamed because I just didn’t believe in the drifters and addicts, and found the dignity and small acts of kindness as unconvincing as the rest. The narrator is a homeless young woman addict who has grown up in foster homes, at least some of them sites of sexual abuse. She has a good friend and protector in an older man, who doesn’t exploit her sexually and tries to find ways for her to avoid turning tricks for cash. They fall in with a very unpleasant character and it goes seriously downhill for both of them. There are no surprises in the plot,and the characterisation is minimal.

The narrator is not stupid, though she is extraordinarily obtuse at key moments, but she’s uneducated and very limited in her experiences. And very often in the writing, one has a sense of the writer pushing against her ignorance and limitations to say something that’s beyond her. Sometimes she quotes her friend (using the word ‘osmosis’, for example) and says she doesn’t understand what it means. Other times, it just feels as if she has become pretty much a ventriloquist’s doll for the author. Here’s a taste, from a passage early on where she’s describing what it’s like to use heroin:

I don’t want to make it sound romantic. Except it is romantic. And it’s just about the most wonderful thing there is. I love it. And it’s something I’ll always love, probably as long as I live. I suppose it’s a bit like smokers – maybe that’s a good way for people to think about it. Smokers might quit smoking because of all the other shit that goes with it, but the actual smoking part is something they enjoy – something they might always love. But they just make a rational decision, I suppose, that the downside isn’t worth it.

But for me, the downside is worth it. Because downside is pretty much all I’ve ever known. Getting high is my only glimpse of the upside, if that makes sense.

(Page 16)

To be fair, the unadorned narrative has an occasional meta touch that works well, if the reader is feeling forgiving): the main pair occasionally sneak into movies, and their tastes run to art-house features like Dogville and Pan’s Labyrinth. The narrator pours scorn on Hollywood’s need for happy endings, and there’s some discussion of whether the ending of Pan’s Labyrinth is meant to be real or just the girl’s fantasy. So when we come to the book’s ending (not to be too spoilerish), there’s a big doubt cast over what is actually happening. And in a clever postmodern way, the opening pages only make sense if read after the ending.

That said, it may be that it was a mistake to read The Rip so soon after two superb books: Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe, which treats the world of ‘drifters and addicts’ with so much passion and complexity, and Elie Wiesel’s Twilight, which never tells the reader what to think and is never predictable. Whatever, it didn’t really touch the sides for me.