High life

Dead Wife is What I Told Her

Matthew Stokoe, British-born author now living ‘somewhere in the southern hemipshere’, achieved notoriety in the late 1990s with Cows, a nasty and visceral novel that was surrealist without being necessarily funny, unless shit-eating and cow-raping are humorous. He’s followed it up with High Life, a far more restrained story that nonetheless reads like a noir ‘tec thriller as written by Hunter S Thompson or Jean Genet.

His protagonist, Jack, a young man turning up in Hollywood with the idea of making it big in the media, subsists on a diet of glossy magazines and advertisements, believing not so much in the products they advertise as that the artificial lives they portray are real and in some way attainable. Nonetheless he .finds himself doing menial jobs and married to Karen, an escort girl - first of all marriage at least is pleasant but then the wife wanders off, her life as a whore takes over.

Then she ends up dead. Not just dead but eviscerated. The police don’t seem interested - being a prostitute, the girl’s death doesn’t matter to them. (this is a reason suggested as to why prostitution should be legalised - that there exists at present a number of women and some men who, while not actually doing harm, are outside the law and basically Don’t Count).

Jack decides to investigate for himself, and finds an unlikely buddy-cop ally in the fat shape of Ryan, a Vice Squad policeman, a very dodgy figure who initially suspects Jack of the murder but changes his mind as the investigation progresses. The cop tries to ground

Jack in the sort of thing he’s dealing with: showing him the depths of depravity and dragging him along to high-class functions, at one of the latter Jack meets a beautiful and entrancing woman who seems to find him as attractive as he does her. He still has one foot in the poor life of downtown, and a junkie friend who serves as some kind of conscience, but he seems to be moving into the glamorous life he’s been after.
Naturally this meeting and rapture isn’t quite as by-chance as it might seem. Jack gets enmeshed in a femme-fatale weave, still with his cop friend doing the Virgil bit as guide to heaven with occasional glimpses of hell. There is talk of organ-theft and a thin excuse that it’s for philanthropic reasons. There are new sexual perversions which nonetheless don’t have the revolting nature of the behaviour in Cows. Alongside this, and giving Jack even more to lose, his career genuinely does seem to be picking up, with him co-presenting a show on local television and appearing in TV commercials, and he starts a far more genuine relationship with a woman working in the media world he’s getting into. Even so the case of the Eviscerated Wife begins to make sense and it is no surprise to learn who is caught up in it.

Along with Cows, High LIfe has: a character obsessed with glossy-magazine life and confusing it with reality; evisceration; and coprophilia. It is however a very different book without the surrealism of the first, and the grand-guignol bits don’t overwhelm as they did in the earlier novel. High Life is noir for the MTV generation.