Culture

Other reviews i’ve read of Ben Atkins’ first novel Drowning City tended to sound something like: “ZOMG this teenager wrote a book when he was like 17 and then it was published when he was 19 ZOMG and it sounds just like a real person wrote it, this is incredible!” The problem with this is that his age isn’t impressive. At all. Any teenager with a reasonable lack of social life can write a book. And all it takes for a teenager to get a book published is for them to have written an acceptable facsimile of any common genre, since publishers know that they can market it with “ZOMG the infant can spell” and adults will buy it and go, “My word, who knew that teenagers were capable of anything even semi-rational, ZOMG indeed.” And yes, Atkins is a New Zealander, so there seems to be some patriotism going on. But, come on, he lives in Auckland, which we all know is the primary New Zealand way of being a terrible person. Plus his book isn’t set in New Zealand, so his Kiwiosity is all kinds of irrelevant.

Drowning City is a hard-boiled noirish crime novel set in LA during prohibition. It’s about, and narrated by, a bootlegger name Fontana. Now, the personality of a first-person narrator can make or break a book. Fontana is a judgemental asshole who thinks he’s better than his fellow criminals, the police, ordinary people, and people who talk. This attitude is unjustified, because Fontana isn’t better than other people; he’s an incredibly self-centred dickhead who can’t shut up. If Fontana is so quiet, (and trust me, he brings up his quietness, and how much he dislikes con- versation, a lot) why the hell is he rabbiting on to me about everything that crosses his mind and every person who crosses his path? There are some qualities a first-person narrator cannot convincingly have.

This book is terribly over-written. The first 70 pages are arguably completely unnecessary and seemed to me completely uninteresting. 70 pages in I finally learnt what the conflict was, and about a hundred pages in it got tolerably readable in a “hey, something’s happening I can half-care about” way. That’s a lot of not caring to go through.

In the interests of full disclosure and reviewer integrity, I must acknowledge that this book is often praised for its atmospheric atmosphere and evocative setting (the setting evokes where it is set, I assume). I am naturally impervious to both these qualities and have no capacity to evaluate them. I’ll notice if a setting is too wobbly to make the slightest sense, but I don’t care about places or respond to them, and so I’ll only notice a setting if it isn’t doing its job. But apparently Atkins does a fantastic job of making his imaginary LA in the ‘40s seem like a real place, or like the real place, or whatever it is that people who like settings like about settings. Shrug.

If you have heard of this mysterious hardboiled genre and want to know what its deal is, then you should pick up some Raymond Chandler. If you want something written by someone genuinely young enough for it to be a talking point, I suggest Axe Cop. If you are already familiar with the hard-boiled genre and/ or crime writing in general, Drowning City is possibly worth a read, or at least an attempt thereof. However, don’t expect to be blown away, unless you’re, like, super awed by the sheer astounding astonishingness of teenagers who can string together whole sentences.