That world is vividly projected, almost entirely through the mix of Crystal's meditations and the conversations with an assortment of Frazer's cronies and underlings.
"He was the floppy disc reading my insides. He was on the answering machine asking me questions. He was in the library trying to shout me down. He was a signal and I was a satellite dish ready to receive him. Barbs snatched the phone receiver out of my hand. 'She's not talking to you ever again, so leave her alone.' She hung up. But I knew that the silence on the other end of the line was filled with weird intention. I recognised the high-pitched edge in the voice, that would escalate into violence. Soon he arrived in the driveway of
my childhood house. I saw his thinning hairline pull up in the car. I rushed upstairs. I saw him mount the stairs in the hallway. The house was letting him in."
It is a novella that needs to be read in one sitting, and its length is exactly right for just that. I came out of it wrung out but impressed.
The City of Detroit is Inside Me, in contrast, is a frankly autobiographical prose-poem of sustained revulsion and despair, as the author hitch-hikes her way through the terrible cities of what she likes to call the United States of the Apocalypse: Chicago, New York, and finally Detroit. Out of each city she recognizes the future and it is terrible. Anarchy is released upon the world, greed and violence have pulverized the landscape and human sympathy and concern have been relegated to the garbage tips.
In blistering prose she paints remorselessly bleak images of these cities, struggling to find some tokens of compassion. She clings to her own instinctive feeling for animals, only to see people she meets already deadened and uncaring. If her vision of Chicago is apocalyptic, New York is, predictably, the carrion corpse, though the Statue of Liberty still has the power to waken some glimpses of a vision that once had offered promise. The tantalising image of The Boy, some recurring and subliminal creature of the imagination seems to be, apart from the animals she saves and protects, the one recurring glimpse of possibility, ambivalent and unreachable.
Towards the end, there is a poignantly lyrical interlude, but it, also, becomes a lament:
"I had a backpack full of puppies and kittens, and a big friendly rat in my hair. I always knew when one inside the pack stopped breathing, as there would be this tiny stillness along my back. For a few seconds all the other baby animals would stop breathing, meowing and yapping as if for a moment's silence. Then I would have to stop moving and lower that backpack to the icy ground. I would remove the small body so that it didn't disturb the others, and become a small hard weight upon my shoulders."
This is a vast hymn on pain and despair, relieved by only moments of tiny celebration. I have never been to Detroit, but Coral Hull's picture of that dying city is horrifying and has an awful ring of authenticity.
(Reviewed by Thomas Shapcott, March 2004)
