Cape Town - Steve Toltz’s grim comic novel ‘Here Goes Nothing’ hangs on the gallows humour of a whole condemned race. Every copy of this book should come with a starter dose of Prozac.
We meet the narrator, Angus, when he’s already dead. The grave has clarified one important theological point - if only by failing to bring everything to a close. In life, Angus admits, he was sure that “the very notion of an immortal soul was only a way to avoid facing our imminent trip to Nowhere. It’s humiliating how wrong you can be”.
Angus is - was? - a petty criminal who’d finally settled down, more or less, with a quirky woman named Gracie. Theirs was a marriage of opposites. Angus harboured bitter scepticism. Gracie, meanwhile, cultivates a deep faith in the whole pantheon of spirituality - from Ganesh and the Virgin to ghosts and angels.
In the opening pages of the novel, a new virus has leaped from dogs to human beings and is dragging its scythe around the globe. An old man comes to the door and convinces Gracie that he used to live in this house. His dying wish is to be allowed to pass away here in these familiar rooms. Being an old softy, Gracie agrees, but Angus can see through this scheme. So the stranger kills him.
Trouble is, that’s not the end of this novel - or of Angus. While his widow carries on bravely, wondering how her husband died, Angus finds himself in an afterlife that looks like a depressed town in the 1970s.
Confronted by a seamless continuation of the same political, social and personal absurdity they endured in life, these souls grow jealous of “zombies with their outdoor living and their simple diets”.
There is no ambrosia here, just bad coffee. Instead of getting wings and a harp, Angus is assigned to a job in an umbrella factory.
The pandemic and our bungling efforts to control it aren’t the story’s only contemporary allusions. There’s also a veiled swipe at the MAGA crowd when the dead folks violently object to the arrival of more and more “immigrants” from the other side.
“Here Goes Nothing” is a relentless deconstruction of religious certainty and spiritual affirmation.
Clever lines drop down on these pages like flowers thrown on a casket. But a plot about the eternally static nature of reality risks being infected by its own lack of progress.
Behind this zany, increasingly dark comedy, though, lies a wry rejection of the persistent hope that death will either snuff us out or make us better by serving up justice, solace, salvation, revelation, something.
The bad news is that improving ourselves is still and forever up to us alone.
Here Goes Nothing by Steve Toltz is available at www.loot.co.za (R523)
Cape Times