ooo A descent into beauty and terror, Gone Deep South reveals the seldom seen grandeur of the southern hemisphere while laying bare a case of love, sex, betrayal and revenge in 21st century Paris. Beginning with the fishtailing innocence of a 1956 Chevy Bel Air and ending with the crunching assuredness of a chauffeur-driven 1973 Lincoln Continental limousine, this unusual work weaves together two narratives: one of a simple year away, a sabbatical, a time meant for recovery, but for recovery from what, exactly? For while the travel narrative moves forward simply and chronologically, leading us forever southward in our imaginations, the second narrative sifts through selective memories that become less and less selected the more the narrator becomes entangled in the all-too-common disintegration of marriage and its aftermath.
ooo There is the exuberance of his early career as a teacher in both France and the United States, and the two are compared to rather comic effect, only to have the comparisons come back to haunt him. There are the seemingly simple relationships in Salt Lake City, those of his family and golf-playing brothers, set against the complexities in the minds of Europeans, and especially two Europeans: a German colleague, Christiana, namesake and confidante, blonder than blonde and feral in her coterie of African gangsters, and a French-Jewish artist named Angel, dangerous in her sensitivity, surreal in her appearance and single-minded in her pursuit of an ideal. The resulting clash between these two sets off consequences that spin out of control and yet remain on the road, the road being that of the travel narrative, of the escaped man, of the narrator on his idyllic adventure gone awry.
ooo One can read Gone Deep South as a simple morality play set in postmodern times, but it is closer to an amoral road novel with Ruta 40, the Route 66 of Argentina, leading us down and away from morals and more into innocent savagery, terra incognita, three thousand miles to Tierra del Fuego and, once there, back up again on the carretera Austral in Chile, which is literally effaced by a volcanic eruption in Chaitén, leaving the only way out over the ocean. The natural wonders of Patagonia, its eerie, bluish glaciers, its emptiness and above all its unceasing, uncaring winds are used to not only shed a metaphoric light on the narrator’s progressing madness, but also as a way to humble all human endeavor and allow the reader to simply enjoy the planet as it is, to be aware of it and beware.
ooo With escape over the ocean, the second half of the novel rolls on in New Zealand and Australia, two countries sharing the same language but offering opposing slants on landscape and travel. In New Zealand the green intimacy is succulent, the hospitality superb, and the ensuing chapters of Parisian reminiscence bring on the unexpected sweetness of an affair between the narrator and his namesake, an affair that cushions the fall from divorce and, with the upcoming sabbatical common knowledge, seems as clear and as cost-free as the twelve pounds of marijuana found in the ceiling of his university classroom. But nothing is clear and cost-free, especially in Paris, especially when Angel reappears and is not to be denied. The narrator, freed from marriage, takes his newly-found freedom too far but thinks he can handle the situation, but that is what he gets for thinking as the situation spirals out of control and the tangy apple of New Zealand is left for the harsh outback of Australia and the excitement of loving two different women devolves into atavism and terror.
ooo As Australia unrolls its flat page and the reader finds much more than any tourist brochure dare admit, in Paris, sex and drugs become not lighthearted sweeteners but weapons of possession, and jealousy rears its ugly head between the women as the minor character of Mohammad steps to the fore. The more this up-and-coming entrepreneur involves himself in the situation with his sage advice and business optimism, the more the story twists into new territory. For little does the narrator know, but he is being sized up for recruitment into Mohammad’s green business ventures, and during that summer’s vacation to America, after a surreal reunion with Angel, he meets up with the young man in the Utah desert and is introduced to a Saudi prince and his entourage. The prince jokingly offers help with the women, but the joke is lost on the narrator, who returns to Paris to find himself locked out and under threats from the German and her African gang, who have relieved him of his possessions.
ooo Australia couldn’t care less, however, and as the chapters crackle up and down the east coast and then enter the outback, sanity seems farther and farther away, and the unusual fauna of the country, the crocodiles and kangaroos, the dingoes and jillaroos, the snakes and the insects take over. Here one can feel the power of the island continent, but it is not with the love and awe felt for Patagonia but with uneasiness and fear, metaphorical for the happenings in Paris as the final months approach before leaving. Angel is still there with her hopes, but in the dark about the planned trip until one night she is told, and from that moment turns into a fantastic being, both attractive and frightening, with changing hair and body that carries ancient scripts each time it is uncovered. It is also discovered that Mohammad has rented an apartment right across the street from her, and when the narrator’s brother informs him of a missing gun, a gun with a history stretching from Germany in 1939 to the present, a gun their father had obtained during the war, everything soon becomes dangerously real.
ooo Yes, the gun is there, stolen from the bedroom drawer by the friendly visiting Mohammad and brought to France by the diplomatically unsearched prince, then placed in the narrator’s hands with orders to kill the German, to take revenge on what she has done. When told it isn’t worth it, that stealing what was taken and not paying for work rendered was bad, but not that bad, he is told that he is to do it or it will be done for him, along with a few other deaths due to a bombing, a bombing which will be pinned on him, the narrator, who in only a few days is to be off on his wonderful trip South. Blackmail is such a wonderful thing, and as the final chapters in Australia find sympathetic dingoes philosophizing about time and memory, the chapters in Paris unfold into a climax both surprising and somehow intuited, and the novel ends where it begins, in a blizzard.
ooo Autobiographical fiction can often be seen to be all too much navel-gazing, but in the genetics of this double-helix, a lack of self-awareness is offset by an abundance of panoramic detail that makes Gone Deep South a satisfying book to discover.
Chris Ames Blog 