I picked this up for a lightweight read after plowing (happily) through Philip Jones. Kimberley from my old work read and reviewed it a few years ago and she highly recommended it, but with the proviso that she doesn't really read any Australian fiction. This intrigued me as I didn't know anything about Max Barry, and also because Kimberley always has immaculate taste in books. But why not Australian?It wasn't long before I understood how the book slipped through K's cultural cringe radar. Syrup is possibly the least 'Australian' book I've read this year, choosing instead to locate itself in California, and the cutthroat world of corporate marketing. Barry is a satirist, and chooses his victims well: superficial marketing execs, two-dimensional corporate wage slaves, money-hungry twenty-somethings, vacuous Hollywood stereotypes. It all revolves around the central character, Scat, and his belief that all of us have three million-dollar ideas per year. One of his is to invent a new type of cola, called FUKK, which he intends to market to Coca-Cola. He does this, and sets off a chain of events that allow him to exercise his great ideas in ever-increasingly farcical situations.
So, its a free-flowing and funky anti-establishment romp, with plenty of hip cultural references, an undercurrent of sex and fame, and a spattering of editorial-esque comments on the clandestine tools used by marketers, appearing in different fonts outside the text a la Douglas Coupland. And it was when this dawned on me that the experience started to sour. So much of Syrup has been said before, and better, by the cultural bowerbirds that preceded Max Barry - Bret Easton Ellis, William Gibson, and Coupland. I mention Gibson because Barry is remarkably prescient in some of the novel: written in 1999, it predicts the black Coke can of Coke Zero, the merging of advertising and media we see all around us nowadays, the propensity for celebrities to invent names to make them stand out from the crowd like Beyonce and Fifty Cent. But conversely the book almost feels like a dinosaur already - characters still use payphones and shoot film on 16mm stock - to the point where a member of Gen Y reading it could find some of the references quaint but not cool or clever like Barry tries to be.
This is no fault in itself - writers do not necessarily create for the generation that succeeds them - but it is a danger when the writer starts to riff on their own imagination and loses the reader. Even for a farce, the situations Scat and his partner 6 find themselves in are completely unbelievable, and Barry keeps ramping them up by placing even more unlikely obstacles in their path, and allowing his characters to overcome them, often through a brilliant 11th hour lightbulb moment. For some reason this seems to actually leech out the tension that he is trying to create - you start to expect the clever rebuttal or the cunning stunt - and this becomes boring. I read the book in just a couple of days; easy, because it lacks much in the way of description or analysis of the character's motivations and relies almost entirely on the plot and how it is played out. This smacks of an expected readership with a limited attention span, and this may be exactly who Barry wrote the book for. Funnily enough, his most recent project is a stream-of-consciousness style novel that he is writing then emailing to recipients one page at a time.
I don't know, maybe I'm just getting too old for clever, or just learning to prefer substance over style. I think Barry is a good writer, he can tell an engaging story and his jokes are pretty funny; but for the American market, where this book seems to be aimed, they already have Jonathan Franzen and David Sedaris and Chuck Palahniuk doing this really really well, while also saying some pretty important things. In this book, Max Barry reminds me a bit of Clive James, a writer I have never warmed to, who always seems to be the loudest person laughing at his own jokes.
The wrap-up:
Australian themes - We are all guilty of materialism in the first world, Australians as much as any, but its interesting that Barry didn't choose to set his book here, maybe we just aren't shallow enough?
Australian characters - There is a vague reference to Scat being born in Australia but these are all ultra-American figures, instantly recognisable.
Australian settings - The book is set completely in Los Angeles.
Australian voices - Can a non-American skewer Americans better than a native? The only Australian voice is the author's.
Australian focus - In the world of these characters, nations are just facets of the global market, and nationhood is just another button to be pushed.
