We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“DANCE PRONE” by David
Coventry (Victoria University of Wellington Press, $NZ35)
Do you have to be an expert in punk-rock music to
appreciate David Coventry’s second novel Dance
Prone? If so, then I would be totally excluded. All I know of punk-rock
comes from seeing films such as Sid and
Nancy and The Great Rock and Roll
Swindle back in the 1980s when I was a film reviewer; and they dealt with
the British variety of punk, not the American variety that concerns Dance Prone. David Coventry makes some
references to real punk-rock groups about which I know nothing. The novel
probably has some in-references that I don’t get. Even so, I don’t feel
excluded. After all, I don’t know much about cycling as a sport, but I had no
difficulty reading and admiring Coventry’s first novel The Invisible Mile [see
review below] concerning the Tour de France in the 1920s. In both, it’s the
author’s skill and ability to create a sense of immediacy that makes for
readability, and Dance Prone is not only about punk-rock any more than
The Invisible Mile was only about cycle racing.
The
two novels have much in common. Both are told in the first-person. In both, the
narrator is a man who has to spend much time trying to come to terms with
traumatic things in his past. In both, the narrator is somebody whose mind is
often disoriented by the ingestion of drugs and alcohol. Both also feature gruelling
journeys – in this case, the punk-rock band travelling from gig to gig, mainly in
the south-west of the USA, in 1985; and then, in later years, the journeys of
the main character to out-of-the-way places like New Zealand and North Africa. Across
its 400–odd pages, Dance Prone disrupts
linear time and jumps between 1985 and the early 21st century, with
chapters ranging from 2002 to 2020. In other words, we see the main characters
in their 20s and then ageing into their 40s and 50s. Ageing and memory are key
preoccupations of this novel, as they fittingly are for an author who is now in
his fifties and who, reportedly, was himself once part of the punk scene.
In
1985, the narrator Con (Conrad Wells) plays in a punk-rock band called Neues
Bauen which sometimes shares gigs with other groups called Spurn Cock and Rhinosaur.
He’s frontman, guitarist and vocalist. Others in the group are Spence (Spencer
Finchman), Tone (Tony Seburg), Angel, and sometimes a Leo Brodkey. All are
apparently American except for the New Zealander Tone. All are of college age,
with some of them dropped out of degree courses, and some trying to keep up
with study; so there’s a bit of intellectual conversation when they’re not
drunk, doped or hung-over. As Con says “we’re nerds practising like retards,
so we can be as loose as the shits” (p.12).
These punks are more middle-class than the earlier British working-class
kids who kicked off the original punk-rock. Tone’s sister Sonya and occasionally
a girl called Vicki follow the band and its fortunes – sort of groupies, but
sharp enough to be not only that.
The
punk-rock lifestyle is not varnished for us. The novel’s opening eight pages
give us the grunt and sweat and loud and provocative performance and
destructive stunts of the band on stage, and the Dionysian fever and violence
of the audience. The band plays to “students and badass scene kids crazed on
trucker speed and bourbon” (p.43). Fights routinely break out as people smash
bottles and try to jump on stage. Blood, sweat and snot fly around. Grot and
dirt are trademarks of the milieu. Between gigs, the band travel in a cramped
van which, we are told, reeks of pizza, unwashed clothes, rust and the smell of
semen left over from casual sex or masturbation. Sex is usually confrontational
at least, and often verging on the violent. Sometimes there’s the suggestion
that this environment adds up to a collective madness. Very late in the novel
Tone declares, of the bad things that have happened in their lives, that “Everything happens when we’re all together”
(p.353). Folie-a-deux multiplied a
bit. Some conventional critiques of the music (of any genre of music!) crop up.
In later years, Tone has moved from indie recording and is for a while
commercially successful when the others aren’t – suggesting some sort of
sell-out. As in all human groups, there are pecking orders and pretensions (a
sort of inverse snobbery) in the punk scene. Vicki tells Con “You despise everyone who’s not listening to
whatever record, then you hate them for uncooling it if they do.” (p.14)
Yep, even I have crossed paths with this sort of snobbery and superiority among
devotees of pop, rock, punk, funk, rap, cult movies or whatever.
A
novel has to have a narrative thread – and Dance
Prone assuredly has one. As we learn in the opening chapters, one night
when he is doped and drugged and out of it, Con is raped anally in the group’s
van. On the same night Tone shoots himself (outwards) through his cheek, mutilating
his face but not killing himself. Who raped Con? Why did Tone shoot? As the
novel develops we also learn of the multiple rape of a girl called Miriam, what
appears to have been a suicide and other things not resolved. Unsavoury things
happen to, or are perpetrated by, Tone, Angel and Spence. Con’s attempts to
find out who raped him, and what actually happened to the others, are the
novel’s narrative thread, compounded later when Con has to search for Tone, who
has gone missing.
But
this is not primarily a mystery story. Dance
Prone is as concerned to analyse punk as a cultural and intellectual phenomenon.
Somehow punk rock is a search for either an ultimate experience or for oblivion,
which could be the same thing. Often Con tries to articulate what exactly punk
seeks to achieve, with generalised statements about the genre such as:
“This is the thing about punk rock, it can
have intellectuals and mental defects, criminal, upper-class toffs and working
class pugilists on the same stage, hunting down that one elusive spark
amongst the violence. That one thing said out loud and right into the world’s
face: there is a way beyond this.” (p.140)
Even
when he deplores those who come to gigs just to smash things up, he still tries
to place punk in an historical-cultural context:
“You can tell a prick by the way they dress,
the way they show up at a gig and they’re all in your face because they believe
punk’s about smashing someone for the sake of a brawl. But punk has nothing to
do with fighting. I mean. Look at us. Nerds lost on the way to class,
scoundrels with fast fingers. Skinny butts and weak arms. But we’re also liable
to fuck anyone who will have us. Punk was never about destruction, it was
about reconstruction. The destruction had already taken place. It was
all around us. This was us in the aftermath, conforming in the way that seemed
right.” (p.147)
But
in later years, as he listens to new music the reunified group has recorded, he
wonders whether punk ever reached the status of a true critique, or whether it
merely compounded chaos:
“I always wanted to make music that was as
confused as I was. As fucked. You know. I only know that now. Not as
confused, that enacted how confused I was. Like I didn’t want to make
music that sounded like sex; I wanted to make music as an abstract of how
confusing sex is. But now, I don’t know: this record sounds like rutting and I
don’t know.” (p.184)
Was
punk of this middle-class, college-boy variety reaching for a new sort of
religion? Did it have a theological content? The evidence is ambiguous. The
sheer noise was there to exclude the wider world, to reduce everything to the
immediate moment – all the past, all the cultural baggage, obliterated in
movement and a collective howl. In Chapter 29, someone expresses the view that
getting tattooed – as Con and others do - and fighting at punk gigs are really
a cult means of accepting performed pain to block out the real pain of the
world. Isn’t this what many religions do? In Dance Prone there are long episodes where members of Neues Bauen
mingle with the exlusivist, alternative-lifestyle group headed by the older
woman Joan George-Warren, with her ideas of repeated archetypes where we have
no free will and we are locked into endless repetition of the same forms, a
concept very like Nietzsche’s “eternal return”. Joan George-Warren encourages her acolytes to
act out the rituals of worship from all religions. Is this an attempt to reach an
ultimate form of religion? Or is it merely an attempt to get a physical kick
like a chemical high – a short cut to ecstasy? Similar ambiguity hangs over the
later sections of the novel, where a huge art-work in the Atlas Mountains in
North Africa could be seen as atonement or as an expression of hubristic
egotism.
Whatever
theories there may be about forms endlessly repeating, for the individual there
is the relentless march of linear time, no matter how much this novel defies it.
We get older. Memory fades or becomes jumbled and deceptive. Legends are
created. Con becomes more aware of his age. In 2019, when he’s in his 50s, Con is accosted by some young toughs in Wellington
and describes them as “these people not
yet born the last time I was willing to get a tooth knocked out.” (p.199)
Con also knows that his memory is damaged. Is this the result of trauma? Has he
wilfully blotted out things he doesn’t want to think about? [Iconoclastically,
I also wonder if all the punk-lifestyle consumption of drugs and booze has had
something to do with it.] So memory can’t be trusted.
In
2019, Con sees videos of himself performing in 1985 and is shocked at the
disparity between the event as he has remembered it and the event as coldly and
objectively recorded. He stresses over whether he was, back then, as good a
musician as he thought he was. Perhaps Tone or Spence knew more about musical
technique than he did. Tone’s sister Sonya, who gradually becomes more
important in Con’s life, quotes Vicki on the topic of memory: “She said how all memories, they’re always on
the go…. They’re always subject to incessant adjustment… We don’t ever notice
that a memory’s altered, cos it always looks the same to us… The good news
about this is that memory can’t ever signify reality, not with any degree of
precision. It’s ridiculous, but I find this such a relief…” (p.249)
I
hope I am not carping when I suggest that there is an over-long spinning-out of
dark secrets in the last quarter of the novel. We understand that all the sorry testimony
Con eventually hears could, in fact, be as flawed as his own memories. Even so,
this could have been conveyed more concisely. But that’s the one major negative
I can say about Dance Prone. This is
as complex and complete a novel as David Coventry’s debut was. It’s one thing
to hold together a large cast of characters, as Coventry does. It’s even more
of an achievement to engage readers who have no particular interest in
punk-rock and its consequences, and to make the musicianship of punk-rock vivid
and interesting. Coventry does this too, and in the process reveals the
ambiguity of the genre. Ambiguity hangs over even the domestic peace that Con
eventually seems to have found. Definitive peace of mind remains elusive.
Footnotes: Here
are a few incidental little things that I wondered about in Dance Prone.
The
word “adultescent” (on p.61) was a new one on me, but if it means what I think
it means – being an adult but acting or thinking like a teenager – then I might
appropriate it in future. Or does it mean being a teenager and acting or
thinking like an adult? Tell me please.
Does the cover photo of a cactus also suggests a raised middle-finger - like punk-rock gesturing to the world?
The title of the book. What exactly does Dance Prone mean? I know from the text
that it’s the title of a number Con’s group performs. Beyond that, it could
signal the way punk-rock makes people prone to dancing (or fighting) rather
than reflecting passively. Or could it have a more sinister meaning? In the
early episode when Tone shoots himself and is crawling, wounded, on the ground,
Con describes him as “jerking… his prone,
haemorrhaging figure” (p.18). If you “dance prone” could it mean you’re
playing with death? Or is this one of the occasions where I’ve missed an
in-reference? Please inform me if I have.
Then,
inevitably, there are the names characters are given. Possibly Con is a
wilfully unreliable narrator – in which case Con is a con. Is Tone called Tone
because he sets the tone of the music? And did the author choose the name Joan
George-Warren for his older cultish guru because he was inspired by Holly
George-Warren, who wrote the biography of Janis Joplin? Probably not. Reviewers
and critics can often over-think things and seek clues to the author’s meaning
in unlikely places. Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar, and sometimes a name in
a novel is only a name.
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To
round things off, I reproduce below the review I wrote, for the NZ Listener, of David Coventry’s first
novel The Invisible Mile when it
appeared in 2015. Reviews for general-interest magazines tend to be brief,
terse and lacking in nuance. If I had had more space I would have analysed The
Invisible Mile in more detail, but I present the review unaltered from the form
in which it appeared in the Listener (in the issue of 13 June 2015, to be
precise).
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The Tour de France in 1928, with
most riders on fixed-wheel cycles that lack modern gearing systems. 5,476
bone-shaking kilometres around the map of France, south-west from Paris down
through Brest and Bordeaux, over the unsealed and perilous mountain roads of
the Pyrenees, along the Mediterranean coast and back north near the edge of the
French Alps.
There
are punctures, crashes, spills, cracked wheels, non-functioning brakes,
handle-bars and whole cycles twisted out of shape, bruises, abrasions, open
wounds, broken bones, fights between cranky and overwrought riders and
frequently the peril of death on the open road.
There is exhaustion, nausea, sleeplessness, rivalry between teams, and
some cheating.
If David Coventry’s vivid debut
novel were only about the sport of cycling, it would be one of the most
gruelling novels about a sport ever written in New Zealand. But it is quite a
bit more than this. 1928 was the year the first-ever English-speaking team
competed in the Tour de France. They were three Australians and one New
Zealander. To this (historical) team, Coventry adds a (fictitious) fifth
member, the novel’s first-person narrator, a bloke from Taranaki.
The novel is as much about the
narrator’s consciousness as it is about the great sports event.
The narrator reflects on “Frenchmen who believed our presence to be an
amusement of some cruel kind.” He reflects on money matters and sponsorship
and how teams are arranged and the inequity of it all. He reflects wistfully on
churches and cathedrals at various stops, and how they offer a kind of security
he wishes he could feel. But most of all, he reflects on his own troubled
family background.
Note, it’s exactly ten years after
the Great War. The narrator’s elder brother served in the war and was
psychologically damaged by it. At the time, the narrator was comfortably in New
Zealand. There’s another family trauma that emerges. Guilt is a huge theme in
the narrator’s thoughts. And it gets worse as the Tour approaches its final
stages through France’s north-east, where villages still lie in ruins from the
war. The very sight of them clangs on the narrator’s nervous system. We sense a
grand metaphor in this novel. Participation in the Tour de France is, for the
main character, an act of atonement. It is about endurance and survival rather
than winning, just as the war was.
How the narrator expresses himself
is often poetic, occasionally almost surreal. But then this is in an age before
drug testing. Coaches routinely give cyclists cocaine to pick them up before
the day’s cycling begins. The hero, via a mysterious woman who floats in and out
of the novel, relaxes with opium in the evenings, as well as downing huge
quantities of red wine. One could say that it’s no wonder he gets poetic as
exhaustion wrenches at his brain. But this would be to underrate the deftness
of David Coventry’s way with words, the pungency of his images, the visceral
sense of historical reality.
A
truly extraordinary first novel.
