Can a book be both horrible and yet also magnificent?
I don't know, somehow it seems that the horrible must be strictly separate from the magnificent, and there can be no overlap.
But if you accept that the concept is at least plausible, then surely Alexander Trocchi's Young Adam is such a book.
Trocchi was Scottish, but he spent most of his literary life in Paris and New York, simultaneously celebrated and controversial. Much of his work, including an early version of what became Young Adam, was published under pen names, as it was deemed vulgar, even pornographic.
But Young Adam is certainly not pornography; it is something else entirely. Written entirely in the first person, it tells the story of a short period of a few months in the life of Joe Taylor. Joe is a laborer, but not a tailor; most of the book involves a temporary job he has taken working in a coal barge which is delivering a load on the River Clyde.
Things happen, not exactly to Joe, but also not exactly apart from Joe either, and those events, together with Joe's thoughts about them and reactions to them, fills the pages of this short book in a blurry, dreamlike, feverish way.
The things that happen are terrible, dreadful, vile things, and yet to Joe they are just the course of life, and his descriptions of how things seem is vivid but yet also distant and gauzy, as though everything is real and fantasy all at once. Here's Joe talking about what it's like to wake up in a bunk on a bed:
The slow lick of the water against the belly of the barge was still present when I awoke, as though during the night it had guarded the connection between states of waking and sleeping, the noise of the water only, for my cabin had changed under the pale log of light which entered at the port, defining clearly the greyness of the blanket, the chipped varnish of the plank walls which closed me in. Often when I woke up I had the feeling that I was in a coffin and each time that happened I recognized the falseness to fact of the thought a moment later, for one could never be visually aware of being enclosed on all sides by coffin walls. As soon as one saw the walls, as soon as light entered one would no longer be cut off and so the finality of the coffin would have disintegrated. And then I would be conscious again of the sound of the water and of the almost imperceptible movement of the barge in relation to it.
How masterful this paragraph is!
I can't stop admiring the exquisite skill with which Trocchi delivers this. At the start of the paragraph, we are sound asleep, having some sort of strange sensual dream about being our belly being licked by the water, being caught between life and death ("waking and sleeping"), frozen in an underworld vision. But it's not a happy dream! Joe dreams he is "guarded" from some "connection", and the horror of this dream is vivid and gripping: Joe is certain he is dead and yet somehow experiencing life from within his coffin. Even as he is waking up, he is still having nightmares: the light itself becomes a fantasy creature of some sort with its own agency; it is a "pale log" which has "entered". Then suddenly Joe is awake, and he realizes he was just having a dream, and now the "finality of the coffin" has disintegrated. At first he thinks it's the light itself which has done this, but then he understands that all of his senses are involved: "the sound of the water", the "movement of the barge", even the feel of the blanket on his bed is part of this blurry transition from the dreamworld to the real.
Joe sees the world through a strange and demented perspective, and yet in Trocchi's masterly handling you find yourself inhabiting Joe's mind, sifting through the perceptions he makes as he passes through life, having psychotic breaks that burst open and then vanish as quickly as the rest of us might take a breath or scratch an itch. Just simply doing his crew-work on the boat is a strobe-lit sequence of ghastly visions:
Up on deck the air was cool, cool grey, and over behind the sheds the brick factory stack was enveloped in a stagnant mushroom of its own yellow smoke. Leslie spat out over the side of the barge and put away his pipe.
I'll start her up, then," he said, and went below again.
I let go of the ropes and soon we had moved out into the yellow flank of the river into midstream and were heading for the entrance to the canal. The water was smooth and scum-laden and it seemed to lean against us and fall again, the surface broken with scum-spittles, as we made way. Now and again a piece of pockmarked cork moved past low in the water. There wasn't much traffic on the river. And then, under the dirty lens of sky, Leslie was looking intently towards the quay from which we had just pulled away, marking in his memory, I suppose, the stretch of water from which we had pulled the woman's corpse.
Now, it is boring when you get used to it to crawl along a canal, to wait for a lock to open, for water to level, but you see some interesting things too, like the cyclists on the footpaths where a canal runs through a town, and kids playing and courting couples. You see a lot of them, especially after dusk, and in the quiet places. They are in the quiet places where there is no footpath and where they have had to climb a fence to get to. Perhaps it is the water that attracts them as much as the seclusion, add of course the danger. In summer they are as thick as midges, and you hear their laughter occasionally toward evening where the broken flowers spread down the bank and touch the water, trailing flowers. You seldom see them: just voices.
Wow! How do you even start to comprehend this section? We start out in a "cool grey" industrial catastrophe, with smokestacks and sheds and a "stagnant mushroom". We can't really tell if this is really the docks by the river or captain Leslie's pipe. The odd repetitions of language ("into the ... flank ... into midstream", "lean ... and fall again") set up a metronymic rhythm that begins to thrum within us. There "wasn't much traffic", but the otherwise peaceful departure of the barge from his moorings then startlingly veers wildly from "smooth" to "scum-laden", with its "scum-spittles" and "pockmarked cork". And then, suddenly, out of the blue (or, rather, out of the "dirty lens of sky"), suddenly "the woman's corpse" is there in Joe's mind. And then, immediately gone again, for we're back to being "boring" as we "crawl along" and "wait ... for water to level". How much more boring can things be? It's like watching paint try. There are "footpaths" and "kids playing", and you "get used to it", emphasized by the rhythmic repetition of the "quiet places". And then, suddenly once more, "the danger"! With shock you realize that although there is "laughter" and "courting" and "flowers", we have crossed some horrible, horrible boundary (we "have had to climb a fence to get to" it!), and these are "broken" flowers telling you about the real "danger" in these quiet places.
Oh you simple-minded reader, who thinks that the peaceful riverside is a place of peace and happiness, what little you know of the demons in Joe Taylor's mind, and what he sees in this pastoral sweetness.
Near the end of the book, Joe goes on a tirade, ranting about the injustice of it all, watching the criminal justice system condemn an innocent man. But in fact it is Joe himself who has done this, and here he stands in for Mr. Everyman, blaming the "system" for faults that in the end trace back to individuals.
The social syllogism in which Goon had been unfortunate enough to get himself involved upset me deeply. If any act of mine could have destroyed that syllogism, I should have acted gladly. Go to the police? Confess? In practice I knew it would prove fatal to me. In principle it would have been in an indirect but very fundamental way to affirm the validity of the particular social structure I wished to deny.
Ah yes, practice and principle. Messy subjects. Joe's rationalization infuriates us and yet barely surprises us, having spent 150 pages deeply inhabiting his mind.
Reading Young Adam is a funny experience, for if you are as me you feel compelled to race along, to keep up with Joe's feverish descent into madness, to go there with him and experience it all unfold. And yet, it is all so vivid, and so bitterly and dreadfully immediate, with that "what's around the next corner" feeling, that you want to take the book as slowly as possible, and drink in every horrifying phrase and description.
If you ask me whether you should read this book or not, I don't really know what to tell you.
It was a deeply moving experience for me.
But you must make your own decision.
