Helter-skelter trip into dystopia, with wit and whimsy

IF you have ever been curious about recreation­al drugs, Ned Beauman’s new novel is the closest you will get to a legal high.

Glow, by Ned Beauman Picture: Supplied

IF you have ever been curious about recreation­al drugs but were too sensible, timid or generally upstanding to take them, Ned Beauman’s new novel is the closest you will get to a legal high. Glow is a thriller of sorts, a lurid fictional investigation into the ever tighter grip trans­national corporations hold over individual lives. It is also a vicarious trip into the realm of altered senses.

If, as contemporary science holds we are lumps of meat animated by countless neurotransmitters, then sight and taste, passions and emotions, calculation and judgment, the texture of our every thought is chemically governed. It turns out that the ghost in the machine is a drug fiend.

Beauman has evidently done his research. There is barely a character in Glow who doesn’t know their oxytocin from their prolactin, or ­refuses the latest phenylethylamine-based party trick, or fails to casually name-check synthetic opioids a thousand times stronger than morphine. But this is South London in the near present, a generation after rave culture began in Britain and spread around the world fuelled by ecstasy and techno, and illegal parties held for days at a time in abandoned factories or aircraft hangars. It is not just a rite of passage to be drug savvy, it is a cultural inheritance.

Things have changed in the intervening quarter of a century, however. Beauman’s would-be hero, Raf, a young man with a broken heart (his last girlfriend ran off with another bloke) and a rare sleep disorder that has shunted his circadian rhythms out of sync with the rest of us, has arrived at the scene too late. There are no cracks or crevices left in London’s increasingly expensive urban fabric, and these days Raf’s best friend Isaac is obliged to hold dance parties in rented launderettes. Indeed this is the venue of our first encounter with Raf, when a temporary break-down in the drug supply chain means that he is reduced to sampling a substance first designed as an anti-anxiety medication for dogs. The only uptick in these opening pages is his chance hookup by an oversized tumble-drier with a beautiful Burmese girl named Cherish.

It is a meeting that kicks off a narrative of unusual complexity and global scope, involving a Western mining multinational now moving into the illegal drug trade after catching wind of a new narcotic named “Glow”, the forced takeover of a Camberwell-based pirate radio station, and the disappearance of Burmese nationals from London’s streets at just the moment when skulks of foxes exhibiting uncanny intelligence and guile begin to appear in them. The plot is held together with crazy glue, admittedly, but the combination of postmodern whimsy and real-world compassion that informed Beauman’s well-received previous fictions, Boxer, Beatle and The Teleportation Accident remain wholly in evidence.

This includes Beauman’s apparently fathomless ability to generate simile and metaphor. A few discarded chocolate wrappers in a park look to Raf “as if they know deep down that they can’t biodegrade but are doing their best anyway just to fit in”. Of some particularly degrading pornography made in Southeast Asia, one character cynically observes: “You could make a lot of money from the arbitrage of sexual dignity.” And then there is Bezant, an Australian mercenary cum fixer employed by a multi­national called Lacebark, the villains of the piece, of whom the author writes: “When compared to the three big bodyguards, this man was a pillar of tungsten and steaks, and he would have made any normal product of the human genotype feel like a fiddly new model that had been miniaturised by some clever Japanese company to fit better in the handbags of teenage girls.” Humour, worldliness, wonkishness, faint surreality: such are the base components of Beauman’s prose.

Glow also shares with its precursor fictions a discursive streak: it leaps from idea to idea like mountain goat negotiating a 60-degree incline. Readers are treated to essays on the cultural and neurological grounds of human sleep, the relative market capitalisation of various fast-food and accommodation chains, the accidental discovery of civet coffee, Carl Linnaes’s Horologium Florae, a clock made from plants and, disturbingly, the emerging potential for social networks to be used by government and business to locate and neutralise potential ­“disruptors”.

For a relatively short book there is a great deal of plot to pack in, and it is a tribute to Beauman’s sense of balance that a novel replete with wild coincidences and pages of baldly stated exposition manages to seem enjoyably antic instead of wildly frenzied, freewheeling rather than lackadaisical. Partly this is to do with narrative momentum — no sooner have we learned of some fresh nefariousness on Lacebark’s part than the scene shifts once again – though mainly it is to do with charm. Beauman’s droll and knowing wit is nonetheless delivered with winning sincerity.

Here Raf is exploring an online message board for recreational drug makers, eavesdropping on conversations of such highly technical nature that they should be boring, except that “here it all feels occult, lawless, newly discovered — a pragmatic trade that does not have and has never had a theoretical or scholarly crust”.

Nonetheless, at the centre of it all, Raf feels a gap. What is absent is pleasure … They fetishise the means, but never the ends. Why do these people even take drugs? Why do they spend their money and break the law? Presumably because they want to feel pleasure. And yet you wouldn’t know it reading their posts. By contrast, when Raf and Isaac cut pleasure open with neurochemistry, it’s not because they want to kill it, it’s because they want to look deeper into its lambent heart.

This could as easily be a description of the novelist’s approach.

For all the cool intelligence scaffolding the narrative, Raf is a character who exudes a very human warmth. We want him to get the girl and to vanquish the dark-suited baddies, and you finish the story convinced that Beauman’s real achievement has been to take the strict formal experiment of postmodern fiction and invest it with flesh and blood gratifications.

Glow, in other words, has its hash cake and eats it, too.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

Glow

By Ned Beauman

Hachette, 259pp, $29.99