The Twist by Richard Calder

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The Twist by Richard Calder
pub: Four Walls Eight Windows. 238 page enlarged paperback. Price: $12.95 (US). ISBN: 1-56858-292-7

check out website: www.4w8w.com

There are times in life when you want to throw the entire might of the Trade Descriptions Act at a back cover blurb. Believe me, this is one of those times.

Admittedly, condensing something as blatantly odd as The Twist into a couple of paragraphs was never going to be easy, but what I really take objection to is the tagline proclaiming in a large font: The Matrix meets A Fistful Of Dollars.

Here's a hint: it's not.

At a push, I think the titular gunslinger wears a black coat and has several pistols but The Matrix? Seriously? I get the feeling A Fistful Of Dollars has just been dragged in to name check a western. Any western, so that the 'SF meets Wild West' theme can really be hammered home. Quite frankly, it's all wasted.

For one, The Twist is very much in the pulp SF tradition, pausing only to drag in western clichés as and when it suits. The blurb would have you believe that John Twist is the main character which is unfortunate as the first person narrator is actually an unbelievably annoying sociopathic schoolgirl named Nicola.

As she also has a penchant for sounding excruciatingly pretentious, this makes for an irritating 250 pages. Fair enough if that's part of the genre homage/spoof Richard Calder is trying to achieve but that does not make it a good read!

As for the plot - OK. I can see why the blurb writers got desperate. Most of it hinges on the fact that Venus is a death world with each Venusian tasked with collecting the soul of a dead Earthling which in turn led the Venusians to come to Earth, causing a 'psychogeographic event'. Basically, this is a portal between Earth and Venus centred on the old Wild West, preserving it as the clichéd old West because no modern technology can work there.

I think. John Twist is a gunslinger who escaped a botched hanging, only to collect the Venusian sent to claim his soul, the necrobabe Viva Venera. At this point, I realise I'm probably not the person to appreciate this book, if only because names like that just make my teeth hurt.

Despite being the love of his life, Viva's role is to hang around waiting until he dies for real so that she can cart him off home to Venus. In the meantime, the Cold War is still going on in this alternate world, and the Americans are after Venusian technology to win it for them. Into all this wanders Nicola Emery, the narrator, who moves from the 'normal' East coast to the West with her parents.

Part of what makes this book so infuriating is the absolute lack of anything sympathetic for the reader to latch on to. Nicky is a teenager of indeterminate age prone to running away from school, downing whole bottles of whisky and having epileptic fits. Meeting Twist and Viva on the coach to Tombstone, she immediately wants to be a necrobabe, too, and winds up following them all the way to the border between the worlds. This is all narrated in breathless tones of high, high drama (she never uses one word where six will do) and with a taste for smug histrionics. Reading all this is like wading through particularly sticky treacle.

I have to admit that I was never going to like the camp, pastiche approach of this at all when I heard SF western, I was looking forward to something in the Firefly mode, to be honest. Having said that, despite the plot reading like a drug-induced hallucination. There are some original ideas in here, even if you do come away afterwards feeling like you dreamt them.

Any chance the characters and situations may have had for emotional impact or connection though, are completely undermined by the exhausting narrative voice. As I spent most of the book wishing Nicola dead already, if only so that she would shut up, the finale offered relief that it was finally over more than anything else.

Worth reading? Well, when the narrative switches to being less self-conscious and annoying, there's actually some nice prose there. Unfortunately, this is all too rare and usually precedes another character's lengthy monologue. There are some really unforgettable images woven into the scenarios played out, but the book as a whole is too silly and lightweight to stitch them into anything cohesive, choosing instead to rush from one to another and hope no one notices.

Even these might have been salvageable if it were only seen through another character's eyes. Having such a truly dislikeable narrator was what really killed The Twist for me in the end. No amount of novel ideas is going to save something that falls down on its characters in such a big way.

Jennifer Howell

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