Books
Under most circumstances, public commendation from both Loaded and Heat magazine would be enough to warn punters off. Not this time. Nick Duerden's second novel is impressive. Don't get me wrong, this book won't change your life. After only a few pages the reader is treated to some superbly ill-advised applications of the apostrophe alongside a generous splattering of reflexive clichés. However, Spin Cycle is no less engaging because of its feeble editing.
There are different ways you can interpret this book, with varying degrees of pretension. It could be seen as a Douglas Coupland tale transplanted to millennial Europe. Or perhaps more of a trendy British update of Kerouac. Cut through all this hyperbole, though, and what Spin Cycle amounts to is a well written adventure story which Duerden has patently enjoyed writing. His experimentation gives the impression less of a nervous young author struggling to find a voice than more of someone who is confident enough to allow his ideas to reach their logical conclusions.
The protagonists, Flox, Danny and Malory, are eminently likable. This is handy, as character development is pretty much nil. Duerden's habits of thick description and penchant for taut and punchy dialogue keep the increasingly absurd pattern of events zipping along. A failed kidnapping attempt leads our heroes to meet the once famous Malory Cinnamon in Paris with intriguing consequences. The trio bound off together before they decide to find their separate Nirvanas.
The major problem arrives when the reader is told in infuriatingly blunt terms that everyone lives happily ever after. What's the point of a bunch of Coupland-caricatures getting exactly what they want? Ultimately, Spin Cycle is diet-Kerouac and Copeland-lite. Then again, it is also, light, enjoyable and remains a little obtuse, a little throwaway - and hey, that's no bad thing.
Why is it that holidays are never quite as much fun as you think they will be? You imagine relaxation or discovery, only to be let down. Gringo Soup demonstrates this.
'The Magic of Mexico' seems like quite an upmarket and educational tour. We hear first from the guide, Lisa, university- educated and working as a tour guide as a stop-gap between college and a proper job, though she's nearly thirty. She doesn't seem to have her heart in it; she despises the group before she has even met them off the plane in Mexico. Then the tour is related by members of the group in turn. This kind of narration is quite disorientating. One of the group, Rose, is so relentlessly upbeat that when I hear from her about "the jollity of breakfast", the sarcasm of the drunkard Martin rings in my ears.
So each of these holiday-makers has a very different tone of voice. Dennis, for example, knows many facts about Mexico, Martin constantly thinks about all the women he's slept with and Katrin is having a nervous breakdown. It reminds me of David Lodge's Paradise News. Similarly, each chapter is some kind of exercise in writing, though Lodge uses many different techniques too, postcards and travel brochure extracts (and Lodge has some kind of complete story that he's telling too - it has a beginning, a middle and an end). I find it hard to believe that people who come across as particularly irritating necessarily think like that, in those strange restricted ways, though I can quite see how they might come to write like that. It seems so hard to control one's tone as one writes.
There are very few of these characters that read as anything but stereotypes of particular brands of irritation. Irritation isn't as easy as that; it's a strange surface niggling thing which isn't always there, and certainly not so obviously so. I know exactly why Dennis is irritating, though I don't know why some of my friends are. Is it this which redeems holidays?
2nd May 2002