A Dancing Bear is an online novel, purportedly the only work by Australian author Mark Osher (born 1970) but in fact the work of David Free.
The book, which is savagely comic in tone, tells the story of a duplicitous and sexually deprived university undergraduate named Fenton Bland, who joins a society of student Maoists in order to get near a female Maoist with whom he is helplessly in love. The girl, Charmaine, turns out to be already spoken for: she is involved with the chief Maoist, the obese, depraved, and possibly dangerous Gus, who is determined to transform the Maoists from a disreputable rabble into a crack cadre of revolutionary terrorists. As the Maoists embark on a series of calamitous and increasingly worrying terrorist exploits, Bland must deal with a growing moral dilemma: either he can continue pretending to be a Maoist, thereby running the risk that he will one day find himself perpetrating a genuine, unbungled terrorist atrocity; or else he must dispense forever with his only hope of getting the girl.
Authorship
Officially the book is said to be the only work of Mark Osher, although it's for sale as a paperback (ISBN 1430320540), with the author listed as David Free. Osher, however, is said to have disappeared exactly one year after completing it, having been driven to despair by his failed efforts to get the book published in his native Australia. Bloggers have questioned this dramatic story, pointing to several ambiguities and omissions in the available data. For example, Osher is not listed in any publicly accessible missing persons records; a supposed photograph of him on the original Dancing Bear website is permanently broken; and the site was registered on April Fool's Day 2005. Taken together, these facts raise the possibility that the Osher authorship story is at least in part a literary hoax - a genre in which Australians have traditionally excelled, from the Ern Malley affair to the more recent cases of Helen Darville and Norma Khouri.
Definitive information about Osher is available at the original Dancing Bear website, via an unlinked page that can only be accessed after the reader has completed a rigorous questionnaire concerning the book's contents. On this page, Free admits that he is indeed the author of the book, and apologizes for resorting to such a trick but insists it was necessary to draw attention to his work.
Plot summary
The novel is set on an unnamed Australian university campus. Its setting in time is also unspecified, but internal evidence suggests that the action takes place in either the late 1980s or early 1990s. The first chapter narrates Bland's traumatic inauguration into Maoism, and ends with Gus hastily announcing his plan to enter the field of revolutionary terror. The second chapter sketches the ideological backdrop of the book: Bland is a student of "Socioliterology," a fictional discipline in which the study of literature is subsumed under a more general and highly theorised study of culture, society, language, and other systems of oppression. The Head of the Socioliterology Department is Professor Ivan Lego, whose books and lectures are parodically reminiscent of those of Foucault and Derrida. The Department’s sole remaining exponent of old-style humanism is a lecturer-cum-tutor named Robert Browning - a "haggard defender of the canon" whose losing ideological battle with Ivan Lego encapsulates recent real-life trends in the Humanities.
The following chapter introduces the third and last of the book's main narrative strands. Bland sits down for coffee with a childhood friend named Pamela Scratch, whom he has a dim memory of having had sexual relations with in a sandpit at the age of five. In the years since, Pamela has turned into an uncompromising and fiery radical. She is founder and spearhead of the campus organisation SNARBY, an anti-nuclear group ("Stop Nuclear Arms Race, Barbaric Yankees") which has, following the untimely cessation of the arms race, found it hard to settle on a new project that is "both politically valid and consistent with the acronym." After campaigning for the release of an all-too-briefly imprisoned grandmother ("Secure Noelene Astle's Release, Bureaucratic Yes-Men"), Pamela is on the lookout for a third cause. Bland cursorily suggests that she campaign for the liberation of some other prisoner with the same initials. He then impulsively mentions the name of Neville Aggot, a notorious and patently guilty psychopath currently housed in an institution for the "Differently Sane" after hacking to death a well-to-do family of four. To Bland's surprise, indeed to his horror, Pamela considers the idea an excellent one, and she proceeds to energetically run with it.
As the book proceeds, the paths of all these characters intersect. The Maoists compile a death list, and put Ivan Lego at the top of it. They resolve to plant a bomb near his office. When it emerges that none of the Maoists is an explosives expert, Gus unilaterally appoints one of them to the position, and gives him a month to build a working device.
In the meantime, Ivan Lego has published a runaway best-seller entitled Empty Pages. The book consists entirely of blank pages, in keeping with Lego's celebrated theorem that "every speech act is an act of semantic genocide." On the domestic front, Fenton's life is disrupted by the death of his housemate's cat, whose corpse is bizarrely allowed to remain lying on their TV room carpet for the rest of the book, thus becoming the ultimate symbol for humankind's ongoing inability to resolve disputes over the removal of household garbage.
Pamela Scratch strikes up a personal correspondence with Neville Aggot, and persuades a TV network to air an hour-long special dedicated to his plight. The show is a public relations disaster, but in its wake Aggot receives a slew of marriage proposals through the post. He proceeds to marry one of his admirers in a small ceremony in the grounds of the Butterfly Lodge facility. Robert Browning reappears in the degrading role of workshop leader for Fenton's Lego Studies class. The Maoists' explosives expert is mildly maimed when a half-finished device goes off in his backyard bomb lab. Neville Aggot, while playing in a Staff versus Client football match on a pitch located outside the confines of Butterfly Lodge's electric fence, escapes. He drives to the apartment of Pamela Scratch, who isn't home. He removes a raw chicken from her fridge and violates it sexually. He then disappears, and becomes the subject of a massive manhunt.
With Aggot still at large, Gus is inspired to launch a new terrorist plot, whereby the Maoists, for very complicated reasons, will slay Ivan Lego in such a way that the crime can be pinned on the psychotic escapee. Thus Gus and Fenton, packing a tomahawk and a meat cleaver respectively, attempt to enter Lego's home in the dead of night. The philosopher catches them in the act, and blackmails them into targeting Robert Browning instead. The novel's penultimate chapter finds Fenton, wielding an untraceable handgun, inside Browning's dimly lit apartment, negotiating a mutually suitable way out. In the novel's final chapter Charmaine talks Fenton into rejoining the Maoists, and we are left with the impression that his experiences have taught him nothing at all.
Style and influences
The book owes a clear debt to what is perhaps the best-known campus novel of all, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, as well as to the more surreal and dark comedy of Evelyn Waugh and Joseph Heller. (Indeed a character from Waugh's Put Out More Flags also bears the surname Bland.) There are also echoes of Martin Amis and of the Don DeLillo of White Noise. The insertion of "found" magazine and newspaper articles to advance the narrative is reminiscent of use of the same technique.
The novel's preparedness to deploy multiple styles for parodic purposes (the chapter describing Aggot's escape from Butterfly Lodge is written in the hackneyed style of a football match report; a chapter on Lego's sudden success is rendered as an article from a People-style magazine; and the approach of Gus and Fenton to the Lego murder site is written in a pastiche of Stein/Hemingway/Chandler tough-guy prose) suggests that the author has read and approved of certain chapters in Joyce's Ulysses. Indeed a late and short chapter of A Dancing Bear is rendered entirely without punctuation - a technique that inevitably calls to mind Molly Bloom's interior monologue in Ulysses, but that also, on a simpler level, evokes the rugged style of the Australian joke or yarn.
|
|
|
