And the Ass Saw the Angel

Rain streaked windows obscuring the view on a grey day, a hot cup of whiskey laced tea and Nick Cave pouring out your speakers – this book demands such a setting.

Southern Gothic is a genre close to my heart.  Faulkner’s dizzying and hypnotic dreams cast in stream of conscious writing, McCullers’ achingly poignant glimpses into the human condition, the way the masterful writers who chose this genre are able to capture something indefinable and fundamental about the world.  Everything.  Absolutely everything about this genre strikes a cord in me.

Nick Cave

And the Ass Saw the Angel is Southern Gothic set in the outback of Australia.  There is a reason why Nick Cave’s music is a must for this read and it has everything to do with his being the author.  The vivid depths of his lyrics paired with his voice that draws you in and holds you captive until the song ends only to grab you with the first notes of the next song is just a primer for his writings.

Nick Cave

Putting down on paper what this book evokes in me is almost impossible.  The words I conjure up are a poor ode to the mastery of Cave’s narrative.  Set in the 1940s and 1950s in the rural swamp of Ukulore Valley a fundamentalist population slowly has the venegance of the mute Euchrid Eucrow exacted in his attempt to save Cosey May.  There are shysters, false prophets, child-saints, talking beasts, angels and an obsession with cruelty and the carnal hungers of man.

The words on each page become tangible, tactile and one is almost able to pick them up, turn them over in their hands and examine them from every angle.  Sentences become streets you can walk down, buildings to be entered and an entire structure, world has been constructed by the story and by the life Cave breathes into And the Ass Saw the Angel.

Torrential rains wash through Ukulore Valley driving a population mad.  Cosey May the lovely prostitute in a slip dress atop the hill in a trailer captures the heart of Euchrid.  The family mule the only solace and friend to a man more comfortable in the foul swamp than amongst people.  A man, though mute, is able to communicate with animals and angels.  Euchrid’s thoughts and inner dialogue communicated in the written dialect of the Ukulore poor.  All of it coming together to form the perfect story of good and evil, vengance and redemption.

Australia

a thunderstorm gathering

It is easy to see And the Ass Saw the Angel as being an influence on a show like Carnivale.  Where evil comes in the cool packaging of a religion decaying on itself and redemption for the people comes in the form of the outsider, the other.  God going outside the follies of man’s religion and choosing the one who has never sought.

There is no way I will ever repay the friend who presented me with this rare gem for my birthday several years ago.  Her inscription merely hoping I had not found this particular book because it was so special to her.  I had not, but it is now, just as special to me.  An Australian Southern Gothic work to make Faulkner, Miller, McCullers and all the rest proud.  A striking headlong look at the human condition, the vicious realities of society and the supernatural hauntings man must constantly reconcile with the harsh truths of daily life.

Put on some Nick Cave and prepare yourself for a journey that once started won’t let you go.

kisses,

Michelle

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