Book Review: Earwig by Brian Catling
BOOK REVIEW: EARWIG BY BRIAN CATLING
Hello. Turn of events. I’ve finished the old A-levels and delightfully have sweet FA to do (well, almost) but am going through a real poetical dry spell. It’s this bloody heatwave! I’ve tried to write- but its all roses are red, violets are blue tripe so, if at first you don’t succeed, stop flipping trying. Instead of mooching about all day on instagram reels, I’ve been mooching about all day with a stack of books from WOB- that’s about 5% more productive, so why not give it an extra 2% and mooch about on my iPad tapping out some reviews.
Anyway, autobiography out of the way, I never thought I’d feel strongly enough about a book to actually write about it of my own volition (No, A-level English does not count) but that was until I came along to this delightful book. At precisely 150 pages, this slender, neat novella is the equivalent of a cat-scratch across the face: sharp, unpredictable, and leaving you to wonder what on earth it was for.
I came to this book not out of any intellectual curiosity (heavens no!) but rather as I’ve been on a real Paul Hilton kick lately. I saw the excellent English stage actor as Claudius in Hamlet Hail to the Thief (so nice I saw it twice) in a performance my sister dubbed as ‘evil Jarvis Cocker’ and also as Iago in the 2022 NT production of Othello via their streaming service. I was well and truly gobsmacked that he could make such a vile little man quite sexy. Seriously. Watch act 3 scene 4 and you’ll get it. I’m sure he’s a lovely bloke, but he always ends up playing the baddies- and looks cruelly handsome doing it. So, deciding to have a nosey through his back catalogue, I found that he played the protagonist in the novel’s 2021 film adaptation, an adaptation that was in production pretty much alongside the publishing of the novella. I’m ashamed to say, that, being bored about ten minutes in, I switched off the dodgy streaming service I was using and left it at that. However, upon gambling £3 on the book itself, I was surprised to find that the two are very different beasts- and I immediately found my favourite of the two.
It’s such a short, fast-paced narrative that I could easily have ploughed through it in an afternoon- however, Catling’s arresting prose forces you to slow down and absorb the cruel and confusing world he’s constructed. Like those dog bowls that stop greedy labradors from choking on their food. I banned myself from more than 15 pages at once, and reread chapters, partly to enjoy wonderfully bizarre images, but also to plant my feet further in the fleeting, vague narrative points. What emerges immediately is the sense of Catling’s earlier work, before publishing, as a visual and performance artist. His writing, much like his art, revels in the absurd, abstract and obscene. What I would give to meet the man! His writing demands complete attention and focus in Earwig, and could easily be placed in that internet-generated genre of ‘weird fiction’, if it did not eschew a clear, compactible narrative for complete submersion into a milieu of otherworldliness, cruelty and absurdity.
Aalbert Scellinc is a miserly ww1 veteran, floating across Europe between various service jobs- longing for isolation and comfortable anonymity. An unhappy string of events referenced only in brief (an abusive grandfather, a dead wife, a mysterious fire, a traumatic experience in his military service) brings him to his strangest job yet: a carer for a young girl, Mia, who has never seen the outside world. Mia has no teeth, and it is Aalbert who must insert dentures made of her own frozen saliva into her mouth every few hours. Yep. The orthodontic imagery is disgustingly comic and enjoyable. Although Mia’s speech is handicapped, Aalbert uses his unnaturally enhanced hearing (which earned him the nickname ‘Earwig’ in his youth) to keep tabs on the girl, reporting back her wellbeing to unknown superiors over the phone. When Mia’s mysterious guardians inform Aalbert that he must prepare Mia to enter the outside world, along with the arrival of a devilish black cat whom Mia becomes unusually attached to, the familiar rhythm of their life becomes disjointed. A series of dark vignettes follow and the narrative is cleft between Aalbert and Mia’s journey from Liege to Paris, and their pursuit by Celeste, a troubled barmaid whose face Aalbert has disfigured in a poorly-timed bar fight. The final image of the novel is perhaps my favourite- with Mia having been delivered to the Salpetrierre, Aalbert wanders the streets of Paris alone. Celeste finds him, and with a glass bottle dismembers his face as he did hers. Their struggling fight turns into an ugly, bloody embrace before ‘fatigue, blood loss and despair would allow the kiss to subside and slow into knowledge’. Watching from a distance, Mia’s cat slinks back into the darkness. Wowzers. The novel, at the core of all its wonderful obscurity, is about our constant desire to experience the world from the perspective of another, as Tyre, the mysterious stranger Aalbert meets in the local bar says, ‘to step out of you and become somebody else’.
Comparisons to Bulgakov’s ‘Master and Margarita’ are apparent, and perhaps partly why I enjoyed this book so much. The feline devil has come from Moscow to Liege, and this time there is little social satire, but rather a more introspective examination of the human condition. Catling’s array of rich characters are excellent- with the catlike and potentially satanic Mia, the dogged and hell-bent Celeste, her righteous would-be suitor Laurence, and the part-sympathetic, part-vile-bastard Aalbert. But more than anything, it is the setting Catling evokes, a morally bankrupt postwar Europe, sleazy bars, crap live music and streets of disillusioned veterans that catapults the reader into this distinct world of ‘sadness, badness and madness’, as a reviewer at the Spectator puts much more eloquently than me.
I have recently found out that Catling has a cult hit sci-fi series ‘The Vorrh’ which excites me no end to think of the 1000s more pages of Catling writing I can work my way through! However, this short work of fiction has been a very unique reading experience, and I think I could do with a rumination and a reread to make it all last longer, before I plough on to the next.
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