My Absolute Darling: Verbosity and Abuse Californian style

Don’t judge a book by its cover people say, and I would add, or its reviews, for My Absolute Darling, the story of a survivalist who abuses and berates his fourteen year old daughter, Julia, or Turtle as she is nicknamed, in equal measure, has been praised to the heavens. In particular by Stephen King, who declared it a ‘masterpiece’ comparable to Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, after which, the literary world seemingly fell over itself in order to queue up and lavish further glory on this, Gabriel Tallent’s, first novel.

That isn’t to say that My Absolute Darling is unworthy of the praise and the hype, but that it is flawed and falls far short of being the masterpiece that Stephen King seems to think it is.  Set in a remote, coastal woodlands in northern California, where a verbose survivalist called Martyn lives in a rambling house that has seen better days. Living with Martyn is his gun-savvy, tough, wood-wise daughter and alcoholic father, making My Absolute Daring a tale of simmering hatreds, love, jealousy, and sexual violence that occasionally crosses over into actual, physical violence. In the background nature mirrors real life by being as brutal and indifference to the suffering of the creatures that exist in its world. 

At the centre of this world is Turtle, the books sullen heroine, who, when not being raped by her father, spends her time cleaning guns, of which she has several, wandering naked through the woods at night, or being subjected to Nietzschean tests of her will and strength by her controlling and Sadean father. Examples include being forced to do pull-ups from a beam in the ceiling while her father holds a razor-sharp knife between her legs, meaning that should she try to lower herself to the ground before the task was completed that she would be impaled on the blade.

On another occasion, in one of the novels genuinely tense and gripping scenes, Turtle is coerced into shooting a coin directly out of the fingers of a ten year old girl that her father has brought home with him. The little girl holds the coin at arms length as Turtle finally gives into her father’s wishes and pulls the trigger…

But for all the books successes, there are many flaws and appallingly banal sequences, not least in the dialogue spoken by some of the books key characters, which not only seem contrived but undermine the book’s many strengths. This is most notable in some of speeches by Martyn, the abusive father. For example:

“The temperate may rise six degrees in the coming decades, and that’s not just ‘rising temperature,’that’s a cataclysm. You think we can, stop that? People don’t believe in obesity, and that they can see in the fucking mirror. They can’t take care of their own goddamn bodies. How many people because their hearts are grimy with plaque, do you think? A lot. What is it —— seventy percent of all Americans are over-weight? Half of those are obese? And do you think - can this person, this average American, take care of anything? No. Fuck no. So the natural world, which they cannot see for all their roads and gas stations and schools and jails, the fucking natural world, which is more important and more beautiful than anything this average American has ever seen or understood in his whole fucking life, the natural world is going to die, and we’re going to let it die, and there’s no way we can save it. Fuck.”

“Optimism?”

“Optimism, hell,”…

Martyn continues in this vein for another 200 or so words just in that paragraph and there are several more before he pauses for breath. Yet this environmental ranting is as nothing to that of two teenage boys, Brett and Jacob, from the school year above Turtle, who she encounters camping in the woods near her home on one of her nocturnal wanderings.

“I told Brett the whole story over the phone-he was pissed! He was like, ‘I miss everything!’ - I told him how we were washed out to sea and how it was like making furious love to a clash of orgiastic rhinos in a swimming pool filled with broken glass, and how you made a fire by staring balefully down into the reflective bottom of an aluminium can until your immense force of will was concentrated and magnified by the parabolic mirror into a white-hot spark of pure Turtle rage that could light anything on fire, even the hearts of unwary high schoolers.”

Or 

“We could farm mealworms,” Jacob says, warming to the idea, “in our Styrofoam deserts. They can subsist entirely on plastic. I can see us now: farming our mealworms by day, and by night reading Plato aloud to one another beneath the constellations of a foreign sky, accompanied by the vast grind of an entire continent of plastic bottles churning in the current and by the ethereal whisperings of grocery bags saltating across the mounded plastic dunes.”

Teenage dialogue is regarded as literary kryptonite for writers and the interminable eco-twaddle between Jacob and Brett makes me feel that Gabriel Tallent was exposed to a lethal dose around the time that he wrote My Absolute Darling as it not only destroys the brooding menace of earlier scenes but, in the context of two teenage boys, is not so much Stranger Things but just strange in that no one speaks like that.

Tallent also sets up interesting subplots early on in the story around Turtle and then just lets them disappear. In one, Anna her teacher, tries to befriend her and reaches out to Turtle by asking her to help, or put in a supportive word, to new girl Rilke who is being bullied. Yet, despite Turtle doing the opposite and briefly being shown joining in with the bullying, this interesting storyline is not developed. Nor disappointingly, is the relationship with Anna her teacher, as she effectively vanishes after this scene until the end of the novel when her reappearance seems perfunctory and staged.

Most disappointingly of all is Martyn, the abusive father, as no real attempt is made to explore or really question his behaviour or indeed why he is being so abusive or even what drives him? Turtles mother is hinted to have killed herself after discovering that he is abusing their daughter, but there is no timeline of the abuse so it becomes difficult to contextualise it within the story. Nor is Martyn’s violence, or his random acts like arriving home with a ten year old girl in tow who he later rapes, an act that triggers the books climatic ending, really believable. For such a strong, controlling character they seem almost too out of control.

If anything, My Absolute Darling, reminded me most of another Stephen King endorsed novel, The Fireman by Joe Hill, which was published in 2016. Joe Hill is, ironically, a pseudonym for Joseph Hillstrom King, one of Stephen King’s sons. I say this because the The Fireman is full of lengthy environmental diatribes and politically motivated speeches which, like Brett and Jacob's eco rants, often seemed more about re-enforcing the authors prejudices than moving the story forward.

That said, the similarities between the two novels stop there and My Absolute Darling has much to recommend and an interesting, strong heroine in Turtle, though she needs to find some friends who can speak properly.

My Absolute Darling

4th Estate, London 2017

(An imprint of Harper Collins)

Hardback, 417 pages

£12.99

© Nigel Wingrove 2017

Finding the Words to match the Deeds

The only problem with writing an anonymous book about incest and, in this case, the author’s abuse and multiple rapes by her father over nearly twenty years, is that a question mark will forever hang over the book. Did she? Did he? The authors validity is conveyed only by her words and not by her deeds or the verdict of a court and as such the reader has to judge whether what they are reading is true, in which case The Incest Diary is a deeply disturbing description of child abuse. If not, then this book is an appalling attempt to eroticise and exploit child abuse for financial gain and having just finished reading this book I have no idea which verdict is correct?

What makes The Incest Diary truly disturbing is not just the subject matter, but its brutal eroticism and the authors honest depictions of the sex she suffered, endured and, unsettlingly, often enjoyed at the hands of her father. However, if this is fiction, then those descriptions become perilously close to pornography.

From the opening pages onwards the author relates to her father in graphic terms. That she “wanted and didn’t want him to come in and fuck me” and that when her father wanted her; “I felt his eyes on my shoulders and neck, on my legs, my breasts, and my hips” and that she held her body differently when she knew he was looking. 

It is this mix of desire and revulsion that lies at the heart of the book and the anonymous authors cathartic journey, which for some reviewers have made the book a disquieting mix of almost pedophiliac porn and, in that the abused victim admits to often enjoying and desiring the abuse, an abusers validation of underage sex. For others this is a searingly heartfelt and brutally honest description of being sexually abused from the age of three to twenty one by ones own father and as such who are we to judge how the victim describes it?

Stripped bare of any excess, this is a short and succinct memoir, yet it is also profoundly shocking one as well. For example; describing being tied naked to a chair and left in a cupboard she relates “my father tied me up in the closet and face-fucked me until he came in my mouth and I vomited up the semen”.  Or, perhaps more shockingly still, “I liked the feel of his flesh rubbing my flesh. Putting his cock into me was pure pain until my body was big enough, which wasn’t until I was a teenager, I remember being afraid it would hurt the way it has before - like being torn, split in two, blood everywhere, but suddenly it didn’t. My body was finally big enough; I was wet, too.”

The daughter is to her mother the other woman, and to the daughter her mother is the other woman. Each taking their man away from the other while destroying each other in the process. When the author finally spoke out about her abuse and rape her father denied everything, her family and friends sided with him while denying her. In the end she recanted to save her family and, at twenty one, slept for her father for the last time.

She ends by describing her relationships with men now; her ex husband, quiet, calm, loving and gentle but not particularly sexual, who after twelve years she divorces. And her lovers, including one who uses a picture of the nine-year old author as a bookmark - “He tells me that he imagines me as a little girl when he has sex with me …. that he masturbates to that photo”…

If this book is fiction then it is shameful because it exploits all the real victims of abuse in order to sell, and if it real then it is an horrific reminder of just how awful human sexual desire can be without morality or restraint.

The Incest Diary 

Anonymous

132 pages

£12.99 - Hardcover edition

Bloomsbury Publishing 2107

© Nigel Wingrove 2017

WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! - PART 3: THE GREAT SHUTTENING

In the days immediately following the events at Charlottesville, and before the dust had really settled there were some on the Alt-Right describing it as the Alt-Right’s Munich Putsch moment. The day, on November 9th 1923, that Hitler, hoping to emulate the previous years march on Rome when Mussolini had been able to intimidate the Italian prime minister Luigi Facta  and Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel to stand down in order to avoid civil war and thus handover the reigns of power over to him and his National Fascist Party (NFP). However, Hitler, unlike Mussolini who had some 30,000 armed men to back him up, marched on Munich with just 2000 men and was confronted by armed police who shot and killed 16 of  them, causing chaos and his supporters to disperse . Hitler was arrested two days later, and would, on reflection, resolve to win power by legitimate means - eventually being elected Chancellor ten years later in March 1933.

Charlottesville was not Munich 1923, it was not even close, but it was nevertheless a defining moment in the evolution both of the contemporary far right and of how it is perceived, supported, opposed and accommodated, by the people, the media, the internet and the state. So in that sense the Munich analogy is not completely wrong…

…After the putsch failed Hitler was put on trial and imprisoned where he used his time to plan and to write his manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle or My Fight). The party he led, the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) was banned and its main mouthpiece, their newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, was also banned. As a result numerous new nazi supporting newspapers were started to carry on the fight, likewise nationalists and NSDAP members formed a lose-knit political grouping, the Völkisch-Sozialer Block (the People’s Social Block) which in turn supported the 

newly formed Deutsche Partei (German Party), essentially the NSDAP with another name. 

In December 1924 Hitler was released from prison. Two months later the authorities lifted the ban on the NSDAP and the party was reformed, publication of the Völkische Beobachter restarted and the rest, so to speak, is history.

For the Alt-Right, the wider nationalist groups, assorted Alt-Right and Alt-Lite personalities, as well as numerous other rightist movements of various hues and shades, from the palest grey to the blackest black, nothing is as clear cut. There is no ‘leader’ or defining philosophy, no unifying manifesto, not even a party or uniting force to gather around or run to for a reassuring group hug or mass Hailing; there is, or rather was, the internet and perhaps Pepe, that great smirking frog in the cyber sky. 

But that was before Charlottesville and The Daily Stormer’s shut down beget the internet’s Great Shuttening which, in turn, essentially killed Pepe and the far rights digital Never Never land. Mordor had come to the Shire or Kekistan as the right had rechristened it, and were taking no prisoners.

The Daily Stormer went first, but like a hammy actor determined to make the most of his death scene, the Stormer has refused to die and has been resurrecting itself ever since much to the annoyance of the theatre’s management, which in this analogy, would be the Silicon Valley corporations.

The Daily Stormer may have screamed loudest when the knives went in, but there were hundreds of other victims, many killed quietly and for expediency, quickly, their domains and website content wiped out in seconds so that it was as if they were never there, that they had never existed. Others, less well known, or who had less followers but who were nevertheless important in contributing to the whole, were taken down in the cyber night and their screams have yet to be heard. In fact, many victims of the Great Shuttening will never be known.

Groups like Cross Currents, The National Policy Institute, Occidental Dissent, Alternative Right, The AltRight, Identity Europe, Vanguard America, Radix Journal, Rebel Media as well individuals like Lauren Southern, Faith Goldy, Mike Enoch, Andrew Auernheimer (weev) and Richard Spencer to name a very few. of all the hundreds and hundreds closed. What began as a bit of digital virtue signalling from internet companies like Patreon who closed the funding account of journalist and broadcaster Lauren Southern several weeks before Charlottesville on the grounds that it just didn’t like her views, escalated in the run up to Charlottesville when Airbnb started closing the accounts of anyone they suspected of using their services to attend the Unite the Right rally.

This digital virtue signalling then escalated massively after the banning of The Daily Stormer, almost as if the actions of Google, Go Daddy and Cloudfare in banning the Stormer gave legitimacy to actions that hitherto would have been unthinkable, that is the banning and erasing of a people’s opinion purely because they, that is, Silicon Valley, disagreed, or hated, that groups, or individuals, political views. Our Speech or No Speech was the motto of the day now!

Perhaps driven by the hysteria of the liberal media in the aftermath of Heather Hyer’s death, or indeed as a way of exploiting her death, Silicon Valley joined in and began culling websites and social media in ways one would usually associate with communist China, or Iran, or indeed Soviet Russia had the internet existed pre 1989, and certainly not with 21st Century USA.

Cheered on by the liberal media it was as if all the main hosting and internet companies had convened an emergency board meeting and decided that they had to be seen to be doing their bit in getting rid of some ’nazis’. And for the avoidance of doubt 'nazis' no longer means ‘nazis’ in the Third Reich sense, but rather anyone opposed to leftwing liberalism and cultural Marxism. They would not put it in those terms of course but that is essentially what they meant and each company presumably got staff to troll through their sites and social media postings to find ’nazis’ with a view to ’shutting them down’.

Now, nearly a month since the events at Charlottesville, the Great Shuttening is still going on. Stormfront, one of the oldest nationalist forums in existence, having been established for over twenty years and with some 300,000 registered users, was recently closed down without notice and its domain seized by its hosting company, Network Solutions. And so it continues with ban after ban.

Yet finally, though with reluctance, some in the mainstream media and liberal left are beginning to question both the validity of these actions and the power of Silicon Valley in being able to arbitrarily silence an entire political point of view with a few clicks. 

Equally disquieting, abet only for a few so far, is the begrudging acceptance that backing up and exploiting the online attacks on the right, has been violent intimidation from leftwing thugs and mobs of politically correct radicals who are behaving with the same violence and intimidation as Moa’s infamous student Red Guards did during China’s Cultural Revolution. For many, including Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, who to her credit unequivocally condemned Antifa and other leftwing thugs filmed beating up defenceless Trump supporters in a shocking display of mob violence. 

Yet despite these setbacks the Right is regrouping and rebuilding and learning from its mistakes. Rival internet social media sites like Gab and Bitchute, are openly committed to free speech and have started up to try and break the monopolies of Facebook and Youtube. There is optimistic talk of forming and creating a rightwing alternative to Google (now aka Goolag) and other Silicon Valley behemoths. While others, including perhaps not unsurprisingly many on the Left, are now calling for Google and Facebook to be regarded as utilities in the same way that water and electricity are so that they can be nationalised and regulated by the state.  Something, I am sure that would have unthinkable were it not for the Great Shuttening.

How these developments will play out over the coming months is anyones guess, but what is sure is that if Silicon Valley and the liberal left establishment thought by banning and closing down thousands of sites and individual accounts that they could silence at entire political faith and crush its supporters then they are in for a big surprise. History has shown that revolutions rarely start with one big event, rather they begin with lots of little events and happenings, an incident there, a skirmish here, an arrest in one city, and a speech somewhere else. Drip by bloody drip and word by bloody word, a revolution builds and grows, and the people silencing and beating on the right now, may come to realise that their actions have helped unify and galvanise the right in ways that will make it a formidable force in the years to come. 

© Nigel Wingrove 2017

See also:

- WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! - PART 1: CHARLOTTESVILLE

- WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! - PART 2: WEAPONISED SATIRE

- WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! - PART 4: TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY

WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! - PART 2: WEAPONISED SATIRE

Because the events in Charlottesville were so calamitous and the fallout both extraordinary and ongoing I am going to write several blogs on it over the next few weeks. This is partly because the ripples from Charlottesville, whether in terms of online censorship, street violence, protests, Donald Trump, the Mainstream Media, and right and left wing responses to it, are still happening. It is also because I wanted some time to see how the dust settles…

On Sunday August 13th, the day after clashes between supporters of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and leftwing opponents had left dozens injured and a 32 year old woman, Heather Hyer, the online white supremacist newspaper, The Daily Stormer, lobbed a satirical grenade into the media storm that events in Charlottesville had caused and unleashed carnage.

For those unfamiliar with The Daily Stormer website, it is a virulently anti-semitic, humorous, OTT and rightwing news site inspired in part by the notorious Nazi era newspaper, Der Stürmer, which was published from 1923 until1945 and the collapse of the Third Reich. Its editor, the ebullient and fanatical ‘jew baiter’ Julius Streicher, was arrested and tried at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity and executed. 

Founded in July 2013 by Andrew Anglin, a 32 year-old Alt-Right supporting white supremacist, and run as a news site, The Daily Stormer, is unashamedly and outrageously racist and antisemitic, publishing stories that are often very funny while being savagely satirical and, depending on the reader, either deeply offensive or highly appealing, particularly to a young audience. 

A bit like Family Guy mashed with VIZ comic, OZ (a 1970s anti-establishment magazine prosecuted for obscenity, regularly raided by the police and constantly attacked by the mainstream media), and Charlie Hebdo magazine whose cartoons of Mohammed led to it being attacked by Islamic terrorists in 2015 and the murder of twelve of its employees. In a typical example of the Stormer’s sense humour on June 8th, the day of the UK’s general election, it endorsed the labour leader Jeremy Corbyn with the ringing praise that he would “exterminate the entire Jewish race”, while the Conservative party leader Theresa May was dismissed as a “childless old woman with zero stake in the future of Britain who looks like a Cenobite”.

It was that mischievous sense of humour that led, on August 13th, to the exploding grenade. The article on the woman killed in Charlottesville was, even by the Stormer’s questionable standards, deliberately inflammatory and began with the headline: ’Heather Hyer: Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident was a Fat, Childless 32-Year Old Slut’. The article itself, written by Andrew Anglin, went on to state that most people would be glad that Hyer was dead as she was a fat slob who, had she lived until the average female life expectancy of 81, meant she would have been leeching off men’s work for another 49 years. Hence her death was a plus, with the added bonus that it took out a Bernie Sauders supporter.

Appearing less that 24 hours after Hyer’s death, and at a time when the US media was in a full ‘shock and awe’ mode against anyone, or any group on the Right politically - from the KKK through to the Alt-Right, from Trump supporters to mainstream conservatives - the article exploded just like petrol thrown onto a fire in a burning building. 

This was full-on confrontation, upsetting not just the liberal left but wrong footing and alienating many on the Right and Alt-Right who were already reeling from the backlash following Hyer’s death and the events that had played out at Charlottesville. Yes, it was satirical, but at this stage no one, and least of all a hyped-up media who were now seeing neo-Nazis under every bed, had the inclination to debate the subtle nuances of describing a recently killed woman as a ‘fat slut’.

The backlash which began within hours of the articles appearance, while perhaps predictable, seemed to catch everyone by surprise. Go Daddy, the company that had hosted The Daily Stormer since its formation, and who made a virtue of its stance defending free speech and opposing censorship, gave The Daily Stormer just 24 hours notice to move its domain to another provider. This action forced the Stormer to register with Google, who, following complaints from leftist activists who were now buzzing around The Daily Stormer like angry wasps, cancelled the Stormer’s registration within hours of being asked to do so by activists. For added credibility Google also closed down The Daily Stormer’s Youtube channel as well (Google owns Youtube). This action then prompted Cloudfare, an internet company whose services help protect websites from cyberattacks, to also terminate The Daily Stormer’s account, in what was, like Go Daddy, a complete reversal of their previous neutral, anti-censorship stance.

These actions, all of which happened over the space of a couple of days, took The Daily Stormer off line, while making its figurehead Andrew Anglin and his web savvy hacker colleague, Andrew Auernheimer aka ‘Weev’, into a sort of cyber Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It also heralded in a period of increasingly  farcical cat and mouse antics between the internet establishment and The Daily Stormer as it started on a seemingly never ending period playing “What’s My Domain” as the Stormer website hoped from one host to another.

Starting very briefly with China and .wang, the Stormer then moved to Russia and .ru where it lasted about a day before it was closed down only to resurface a few days later with the perfectly the suited .lol , which unfortunately lasted for just a few hours. After that the Stormer went dark, as in the dark web, the part of the web that is hidden from search engines and favoured by government agencies and notoriously gangsters, drug dealers, terrorists and paedophiles. 

The so called dark web enables The Daily Stormer to exist and to be visited by any one who downloads a TOR link (the Daily Stormer’s hosting company on the dark web) but it is effectively

removed from public view, the aim of its enemies. So, after a weeks absence The Daily Stormer resurfaced again in the real world, this time with the domain punishedstormer.com, where it bloomed, like some rare and poisonous Orchid, for a couple of days before vanishing once again into the darkness. 

Predictably, and almost heroically, nearly a full three weeks after it was booted off the web, The Daily Stormer resurfaced yet again, this time bizarrely via an Albanian host  using .al. But it was not to last, and after three days of normal life in the daylight The Daily Stormer has, at the time of writing (September 2nd 2017), once again been consigned to the wilderness that is the dark web.

Many initially rejoiced in what they saw as the death of The Daily Stormer, especially the majority for whom it was just a name in a news story about some obscure racist, anti-semitic and nasty hate site. What did it matter if it was banned? Well, it matters a lot regardless of what the The Daily Stormer says or stands for, as this is the first time in the democratic West, where the internet was heralded and defended as a vehicle for freedom and free speech, where outside of criminal and illegal activity, ideas, opinions and so on were free, and no more so than in the United States, where under the First Amendment, The Daily Stormer, has every right to say what it likes, no matter how offensive it is.

Ironically, a side effect of all this is that The Daily Stormer is no longer an obscure website, because with each resurfacing, the traffic to the site, like people flocking to see some rare event, has grown, with the dailystormer.al domain getting in excess of half a million unique visitors a day. Consequently, the longer this farcical game of internet cat and mouse continues, the more publicity The Daily Stormer is going to get, with now even the BBC covering and naming it in a news feature describing its banning.

Another side effect of The Daily Stormer’s banning is that whereas it was originally dismissed as just a neo-nazis hate site, its plight now seems like bullying and victimisation, and the new world order loves a victim. Indeed, as The Daily Stormer is pitched from pillar to post on a weekly basis by massively rich, unregulated corporations, so increasing numbers of mainstream organisations and even leftist journalists are beginning to question the validity of Silicon Valley censoring opinions it doesn’t like. So much so that Google, Go Daddy and Cloudfare’s actions may prove to be one of the biggest shot in the foot incidences ever …

© Nigel Wingrove 2017

See also:

WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! Part 1 - Charlottesville 

WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! Part 3 - The Great Shuttening

WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! Part 4 - Tomorrow is Another Day