re:mote voices

Title:The Clay Machine-Gun
Author: Victor Pelevin
Publisher: Faber and Faber

Pyotr Voyd has arrived in Moscow on the anniversary of the Russian revolution. When the authorities turned up for him in Petersburg things got messy and he fled. But arriving in Moscow he meets an old friend who is in with the new regime. However with the current turmoil even associates can’t be trusted, and Pyotr finds that he has killed his friend and is forced to take his role in the new red army. The next day Pyotr wakes up in a mental hospital, he is in a ward with 3 other patients, all of whom suffer from personality disorders. But if Pyotr is delusional how come this seems like a nightmare and his memories of revolutionary Russia seem like reality?

The Clay Machine-Gun alternates the two narrative threads, exploring all sorts of ideas about reality and dreams and sanity in the process, but to some degree at the core lies the discussion of how Russia fits into the world. At the time of the revolution there are reds and whites, and Pyotr is left confused as to who is loyal to what, and what these factions actually mean. Contrasting that is the period in the mental hospital, where we hear the stories of the other patients, through which we get an idea of a present reality, and whether Russia’s fate lies with the West as represented by America or from the East as represented by Japan. Thus we get layered narratives, shifting from a Russia that reads like Bulgakov, through an American vision represented by hard metallic technology and Arnold Schwarzenegger, to Japan and discussions of haiku and seppuku.

The Clay Machine-Gun is a talky novel rather than an action novel, and the way it moves about creates a certain “eh” sensation. What mood you are in when you read a book affects how you read it, so that in my case initially I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. Which extended the “eh” period for sometime, but then I hit the “ah” period, the point where you have read enough to start to join the dots. The point where all the conversations and events start to cohere thematically, where the ideas of identity – personal and national weave there way through each step of the work. Also as The Clay Machine-Gun progresses you are increasingly aware of the bleed between narratives, how a detail from one thread will pop up in the other – which fleshes out ideas of delusion, but also lends the question of which of these is the true story, which is exactly the question that our hero is trying to answer.

Having belatedly hit the “ah” phase, it wasn’t long before I hit the “yes” phase. The point where all these little touches and details are things that you are picking up on, where everything is starting to make a degree of sense in the bigger picture. The point where as you see this there comes a certain delight in the reading, a certain joy which starts to propel you further into the reading of the novel. So that I went from the initial “yes this is interesting, but I’m not quite sure what it is about,” to the “oh yes, now I get it, this is good,” and found myself rather enjoying this book.

Prior to reading The Clay Machine-Gun I had read comparisons of the Russian novelist Victor Pelevin to the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. With the alternating threads, a certain comparison can be made to Murakami’s Hardboiled Wonderland And The End Of The World. Though on reading this novel I was slightly more conscious of parallels with the likes of Michael Moorcock and his ideas of a multiverse and eternal cities, or Mick Farren and the kind of world depicted in his DNA Cowboy novels. Thematically they probably all have the same influences, religion and mysticism, and in this case particularly a Buddhist view of reality.