Dear Ambivalence: The Mustachioed One, The Witches And The Suspended Body- Book Review
The title is a lot, but when the writer is Deadly Premonition creator Hidetaka ‘Swery’ Suehiro what did you expect? The distinctively quirky auteur has produced some intriguingly singular videogames include Deadly Premonition, D4, The MISSING, and The Good Life. His reputation for building interesting worlds filled with quirky characters with a somewhat irregular tone is known. As a pop culture and cult TV and film fan, his references hit hard and fast and so we get influences by David Lynch, The Cat People and a lot of general Americana.
This novel is not a slight undertaking, coming in at an impressive 484 pages. The blurb is peak Swery and pulls you in:
"When the naked, hairless, brutalized corpse of a young girl is discovered in the British countryside, everyone finds themselves asking the same question: Who did this, and why...?
Normally, this quiet idyllic town's policemen spend the bulk of their time chasing around lost sheep.
But then, one day, they found her... Elizabeth Cole. 17 years old, female... Hanging upside down from the town's symbolic elm tree... Dripping with morning dew, shaved completely hairless, missing every last one of her organs.
Witch hunts... Magic wands... Milk lorries... Nuts and coffee.
Neverending rumors... Inescapable sins.
Emily, a detective who was recently demoted from her post in London, teams up with a small moustachioed gentleman named Poco in order to bring the truth to light."
On day of English language release, I bought the book and have been reading it as my October Halloween read. I can say that it is a very Swery book; the fact that the narrator is a cat took some getting used to but it works as a literary device.
It is a gripping and idiosyncratic journey with very heavy nods to Twin Peaks; a cop-with-a-chequered-past Detective Emily constantly grazing on nuts is much like FBI Agent Dale Cooper constantly commenting on coffee and cherry pie, acerbic pathologist Francis Mackenzie recalling snarky FBI Agent Albert Rosenfield and the mixed up secret life of the victim, Elizabeth, is much like the tragic secret life of Laura Palmer. Added to all this is the fascinating lore of the area referring to a haunting tragic history of an English village. It's all very well done but this is obviously an outsiders view of England as there are turns of phrase or details that don't quite sound right; it's a facsimile of England but it doesn't really matter as the central premise is so interesting.
Overall, I found the story to be interesting and engaging enough that I read it within a couple of days. It’s not as eloquent as the works of Sandor Mirai, nor is it as stylised as Haruki Murakami or as mind-bendingly humanist as David Mitchell’s work but it is typical Swery and for those who like his work, this is just fine!