I first picked this book up when I was a kid. When I hated Nick Cave because of the way he influenced my mum (when it felt like Into My Arms was more important than I was). I was scared to read it, so i put it back on the shelf for another time. The week before I left Adelaide I decided it was time.
And the Ass Saw the Angel is not the kind of book that sits well. Its subject is raw, uneasy and makes you feel like not only will you have bad dreams, but you might do something bad that you wouldn't normally do. It is infused with some kind of dark unpleasantness placing acts of evil alongside the commonplace and making them seem completely normal.
Cave describes his writing as a “kind of a hyper-poetic thought-speak, not meant to be spoken – a mongrel language that was part-Biblical, part-Deep South dialect, part-gutter slang, at times obscenely reverent and at others reverently obscene.”
Have ah told you about the hellish fright of deadtime? Do you know about the bloodings?The Chills? Mere fragments of rushing life retained... like handfulls of wind. Time gone haywire. Night and day, the following and the followed, pitch their shining sky-globes from horizon to horizon. Sun serves, moon returns, searing time's cope with their mad flight, back and forth, to and fro, dark and light, like a hypnotists watch swinging in the fob of heaven-- Oh yes, like the pendular action of a naked bulb, hung and set aswing in an empty room. An hour! A day! Gone! Snuck past! Escaped unsullied, unscavageable, never to be lived. All in the blinking of an eye. Deadtime! Deadtime! Where do you go? Who uses you if not me? The killers and the killed. Murdering of mah lifetime - mah living-time. The agony-rack of mah days passing and the slow method of its crank and shaft, the endless chatter of cogs ticking away the minutes, the bonecrack count of seconds. But what of all the deadtime, all the days unaccounted for? where do they go?
The plot maintains an internal rhythm founded by the protagonists muteness. There are no pleasantries, no "how do you do's" quite simply because to boy cannot speak. Instead we receive snippets of his thoughts, a narrative of the religious sect's fall from grace in the township, and a conversation with God. And who's to say that it isn't God who is speaking back to Euchrid? The books dark humour affords an element of compassion for the character who has received nothing but blows since his moonshine fueled birth. But into the second half you come to the realisation that cruel breeds cruel, and while he never had a chance, he has himself become the drunk that his mother was and also the inbred fetishist that was his father.
And the Ass Saw the Angel is an uneasy parable of tragedy and introspective madness, while it is not a pleasant or easy going read it is still a compelling and interesting story. It takes you deep into the dark recesses of your humanity to explore some of those societal issues we usually prefer not to think about, and does it with a wry and black humour that makes you realise that everyone is an outsider and we all walk a fine line between here and insanity.
