By Martin Rowson
Jonathan Cape, 327 pages
Available at Fully Booked
If you’ve ever wanted to be thoroughly seduced, delightfully confounded, dazed and confused, by a work of fiction; look no further than Martin Rowson’s Snatches. The Sgt. Pepper’s takeoff on the cover immediately beguiled me, and the book maintains that subversive, iconoclastic approach. Structurally, it is reminiscent of Julian Barnes’ 1990 novel The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, where we’re given a kaleidoscope of characters, events in history, time-related situations, and recurring reincarnations of some character or theme, all in the service of presenting a skewed perspective of human history. One way to describe this book is to say it’s like entering a Francis Bacon painting, with Salvador Dali and Robin Williams as your tour guides (and I think someone like Igan D’Bayan will appreciate this description).
But unlike Barnes or, say, David Mitchell (Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas), Rowson has more anarchic designs in his warped mind. With Snatches, Rowson picks out episodes and figures from world history with the aim of showcasing the worst decisions made by mankind, all leading to why we now have the screwy, mixed-up confection we call life. To this point, Rowson is known for the illustrations he creates for writers such as Will Self. So you know there’ll be irreverence, wit and dark humor in spades, with Rowson as your tour guide this time out.
And what a phantasmagoric trip we’re taken on. We start off with a chapter featuring the living Lucy (Dr. Leakey’s early man fossil remains), then shifts to the human sacrifice of Hernando Cortes by Moctezuma, and moving on to the origins of the catacombs of Rome and the vagaries of the Inquisition. There’s Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung with a talking sturgeon that dreams, an alternative universe where Superman ends up in a wheat field in Russia, the wake of Joseph Stalin where Trotsky shows up, then materializes in Hitler’s bunker on his (Hitler’s) final day. We encounter Evelyn Waugh and Ian Fleming as Russian spies in Jamaica, cyberspace as a porn conduit, and 9/11 elliptically written about via particles of those who have been killed by the explosion. There’s a brilliant chapter with Candide in Las Vegas, entering a special bar for high rollers and finding Pinochet, Reagan, Kissinger, Thatcher, Gorbachev, Bokassa, Pol Pot and Bin Laden all congregated around the bar.
One extended chapter has to do with the weirdest time portal one can imagine. In Rowson’s world the climax is how the past (the Industrial Revolution), screws the future by sending time travelers, by rewriting their inventions. In this Industrial Revolution, coal is slowly becoming outdated and clean, efficient, water-powered energy is fast gaining ground. But the leaders of the day decide that they have to teach a lesson to the people of today, and so they shift all their machines and harnessing of power to gas and carbon-related means, thus ensuring pollution and the unfair distribution of said power source (oil). In Rowson’s hands, it becomes a bad joke our ancestors played on us.
As expected, while the subjects may be serious, the style of writing ensures that one-liners and completely off-the -wall asides pepper the pages. In one reverie of Moctezuma, he justifies their grisly and bloody version of religion by thinking, "...these Spanish claim that they killed their God years ago and now they eat him in a biscuit or something."
As Stalin views the assembled at his wake from within his coffin, he muses about his party mate Molotov. "Isn’t Molotov an American spy? Isn’t that a drink he’s mixing?" And we immediately make the absurd connection to Molotov cocktails, the nickname we give to homemade explosive devices. It’s that surreal and absurd while still giving us serious social commentary. How else do we treat a chapter about the Irish problem that includes, "Jesus was Irish because he lived at home until he was thirty, he thought his mother was a virgin, and she thought he was God."
There’s delicious anarchy and a jumble of excellent ideas abounding within the pages of Snatches. As with work this sprawling and ambitious, it’s only natural that some chapters work better than others, and some ideas really hit the mark, while a couple fall flat. Think of some stand-up comedian’s act or Dadaist paintings – some will exhilarate while others will look repetitive or trying too hard. What is important is the overall impression, and on this count, Rowson proves there’s much more to him than the illustrations he’s already known for. This is history as we never imagined it could be...or would want it ever to be!