Absolute Zero Cool

Here is the beginning of the review for this book on my blog:


Apart from the fact that it is a challenging, pleasing, provocative, wise-cracking read, there are at least three more reasons Declan Burke's most recent novel, Absolute Zero Cool, should be made obligatory reading for every innocent young student wishing to dedicate his or her life to any form of art, and who takes on the loan necessary to enroll in an institute of higher education, whether it be for acting, painting, sculpting or "creative writing". I will come back to the three reasons, towards the end of this review.

Below are a few paragraphs describing what the novel is about, from the main character's point of view.

You are the half-finished, perhaps never-to-be-finished, show more creation of a struggling crime writer. Even he has put you to one side, and forgotten you, and the only people who may still be aware of your existence are his former literary agent and an employee of the Irish Arts Council. Apart from the fact that he has left you in Limbo, you don't like the way the author, a man with a strong resemblance to Declan Burke, has created you. In fact, many, many elements of his discarded manuscript displease you.

He has given you a name, sometimes abbreviated to its first initial, that would be more at home in a novel written in German, in Prague, at the beginning of the 20th century, or in a normal, classical Swedish crime novel by somebody like Henning Mankell. In the Irish crime writer's hands you have become a hospital porter, selling candy bars to your elderly charges, cleaning their vomit up after them, and committing the occasional act of euthanasia. If you could have your own way, you'd probably ask the writer's agent to propose the manuscript to somebody like Mankell, or Arnaldur Indridason, to polish up your character in a conventional, Scandinavian crime, while giving you an Irish first name, and making you more of a hero than has this author, in whose judgement you have no confidence, and from whose jaded hands you have fallen into oblivion. However, you are destined to be the creature of this Burke-like writer, and the only hope you have of getting some self-respect is by preying on him until you can get him to bend his will to your own idea of a satisfactory plot. To achieve your objective, you are willing to push him to that level of psychological distress at which he will betray his own family's security in order to satisfy your ego.

The author, who may not really be who he thinks he is, finally gets the long awaited retreat, financed by the Irish Arts Council, that will give him the peace and quiet to finish a novel that may, at long last, encounter some financial success. His wife, who has made incredible self-sacrifice so that her man can practise his craft, sends him away content in the knowledge that he now has the space in which to come up with the goods. You, however, Bill, wait for the right moment, at the retreat, and then you appear to him, screwing up any possibility of his finishing the new novel before he has come to terms with you. You make threats, you ask him to rename you, you tell him you are worthy of a more noble crime than topping old people in distresss. He tells you he doesn't have the time to take care of you.

You work out a deal with the crime writer. You propose to rewrite a large part of the manuscript yourself, saying that this will ease the burden he has to carry. He knows better...

If you are interested, you can check out the rest of the review here:
http://johnjgaynard.blogspot.com/2011/11/review-of-declan-burkes-absolute-zero.h... show less