Lee Konstantinou, Pop Apocalypse (2009)

I’ve read a couple of fizzy, near-future extrapolative satires recently—must be something in the air; or the ether—and I reckon my sensation on finishing Lee Konstantinou’s first novel (‘that’s more like it…’) says as much about the Underwhelm of the sub-genre as a whole as it does about the successes of Pop Apocalypse. It’s hard to get this sort of book right, for many reasons; not least (a) uncanny valley, (b) balancing the mix of didacticism, polemic and actual narrative (I call this The Little Brother Problematic), (c) hitting Funny on the bone, rather than the soft flesh. Pop-A manages to avoid (a), which is no mean feat, and scores unusually highly on the (c). And (b) is pretty much there, too; although from time to time Konstantinou gets a little distracted, as it were, by the nuts-and-bolts of his satiric extrapolation.

Pop Apocalypse is set in a 2029 in which celebrity has achieved a kind of total socio-economic penetration (slebs’ reputations are traded on a virtual stock market, their antics followed around the globe), rich and poor have properly parted company, violence, terrorism and systemic-collapse is endemic. Wars are brewing. Godbotherers are anticipating the End Times. The ubiquitous surveillance technologies are frighteningly efficient. Our protagonist, billionaire’s son Eliot R Vanderthorpe, by turns international playboy, whiney brat and moral core of the whole, is trying to stay true to his girlfriend, Sarah, after his fashion, whilst chasing down a doppelganger—an Eliot jr. lookalike wandering about the dangerous San Francisco Bay Area. Since Eliot has just floated his celebrity reputation on the stock market there’s a question of copyright protection as well as one of existential dread associated with this double.

There’s a good deal of rattle and a certain amount of hum in this novel; rattle in the hailstorm of cool ideas, plot twists and one liners, and also (after a slightly sticky first hundred pages) in the rattly rattling-good-read trajectory through Eliot’s various adventures to a properly will-he-won't-he Save The World denouement. The hum is partly thoughtful, because this is a clever novel and cleverness is thought-provoking. Partly, though, the hum is more hmm: not everything here works, and too much has been crammed in—I’d call that ‘Classic First Novel Syndrome’, if that didn’t sound so condescending. The writing is often very well done. By the same token, it is also often a bit too steroidal, or bloated, although to be fair that doesn't undermine the larger effectiveness.

Best of all the novel is frequently hilarious. Eliot fights off would-be abductors in a comic shop, his belligerence enabled by an inadvertently large dose of pharmaceutical stimulants he happens to have ingested.

Eliot kneels, grabs the base of the freestanding cylindrical comic book, stands back up, and swings the rack in a half circle, hoping its radius clears the walls. It does. Peter ducks. The rack hits Aliot [the doppleganger] hard in the chest and knocks him down. The tip of the rack nicks Jack on the nose. Blood violently arcs out of the nick. … The rack strikes a glass display case, knocking it backward …. “Not the toys!” Jack wails, his face covered with blood, his large hideous mouth open in something like a parody of an Edvard Munch scream. “They’re vintage! They’re vintage!”’ [136]

This is excellent; and if personally I’d tone the writing down a little (take out exactly half the adjectives and adverbs, and cut ‘something like a parody of’) I’d also concede that too much polish would degrade Konstantinou’s surprise-by-a-gnarly-excess mode, and that this latter is a large part of the book's charm.

Now, Lee Of-Konstantin, clearly knows from Greek, so I don't know if he had any say in the title page rendering of his text as ‘PΩP APΩCALYPSE’. I didnae like it, I must say. (Pope Apoecalypse. Urgh. And actually, despite the long Protestant Millenarian traditions identifying the Pope with St John’s Beast, the throne of St Peter gets hardly a mention here). Clearly Kωn-, sorry Kοnstantinου knows that Ἀποκάλυψις means ‘unveiling…’ He has fun with this fact, actually. There's plenty of unveiling in this novel, from uncovering the mega end-of-the-world conspiracy at the heart of the narrative, and painting a world in which nothing is secret anymore, right down to the various moments of erotic undressing. The ‘Pop’ (as in ‘-Music’) half of the title is a little less convincing (‘Elijah Apocalypse and his band Eye For An Eye’ who play ‘some heaven-forged fusion of punk, heavy metal, and hip-hop’. I can’t picture this; and the lyrics Konstantinou gives us are as bad as Pynchon’s). But the spill of neat-o ideas is a blast: my favourites, that Terror Forecast (predicting the level of Rioting) will become as important as Weather Forecasts; and that the Telethon might become the ultimate actual political arbiter (‘If you would like the Dome of the Rock to be fully bulldozed and the Third Temple built in its place, please phone +234343343209232. If you would like your civilization (and our civilization to be frank) destroyed, please phone …’ 267). In all, a mighty impressive debut: I'm envious. In a good way.