How
It Ends Steven
Marc Jones
In
How It Ends, Dan Collins captures the spirit of the Western
world in the twenty-first century, giving voice to the barely contained
chaos throbbing beneath the gleaming surfaces of modern life. The
apocalyptic feeling embodied in the title infuses the tacky, flashy
modern landscape he describes with melancholy and suppressed desperation.
The novel explores the texture of modernity, remorselessly exposing
its flaws and quirks, illuminating the ways in which tough experiences
warp and mould our lives. Collins evokes a landscape in which money
is king, where humanity is reduced to the level of product. This
is a world of polished facades and sleazy secrets, of lifestyle
choices and deadly addictions. Relationships are subsumed into a
ruthlessly mercantile world where individuals struggle to find their
identities in an environment composed of product and shaped by the
demands of fashion and saleability. We
see this world through the eyes of Lee Annis, an emotionally damaged
beauty hungry for self-definition, who becomes a Las Vegas show
girl, inventing herself as an object of titillation for the satisfaction
of the appetites of strangers. The narrative voice is witty, deeply
cynical and highly articulate, observing the world with a shrewdness
and intelligence that, at times, suggests the voice of the writer
and not the character. Such is her apparent intelligence that we
begin to wonder who this woman really is! She’s a charismatic
and engaging figure, in spite of her cynicism, warm despite her
toughness. Essentially, in a world dominated by supply and demand,
she recreates herself as a product to sell on the open market. Her
choices lead to an early and ultimately disastrous marriage to Edward
and an emotionally barren life of American shopping malls, MTV and
wearying machismo. Her recollections of this time allow us to see
how she has honed her persona into a kind of man-pleasing doll,
while remaining inwardly cynical and manipulative. Collins cleverly
maintains sympathy with the character by making these apparently
unattractive qualities seem necessary for her very survival. This
is a woman fighting for her place in a pitiless world so a tough
exterior is necessary and, in an odd way, we’re on her side.
Her few moments of real tenderness and connection are spent with
her child, a poignant irony when we consider that she sacrifices
this relationship, escaping her marriage in order to find freedom
and a new path to finding herself. At
twenty-eight, Lee has found a kind of self-definition as part of
Anaconda, the pop band she fronts alongside the sexually magnetic
Billy. She has become the ultimate pop-culture product: a pop star.
Collins wryly satirises the modern obsession with celebrity by allowing
us deep inside the head of a pop culture goddess. By allowing us
such a high degree of intimacy with life behind the mask of stardom,
he is commenting upon the effects of fame with a pitiless eye. Fame
allows Lee to bask in the adoration of millions of fans and temporarily
escape her emotional demons. It brings a fleeting relief from the
crippling lack of self-esteem we discern in her, adulation providing
a panacea for her insatiable hunger for love and acceptance. Yet
the charms of fame are short-lived and we find in Anaconda’s
disintegration the disillusion that results from the satisfaction
of superficial desires at the expense of real evolution. The material
rewards of fame, however, are many. Collins explores the notion
that superficial satisfaction is all that modern society offers.
This is a well-trodden road. Everybody knows that stardom is short-lived
and the pursuit of it brings most to grief in the end. Popular culture
retells this story in a million ways from Sunset Boulevard to
Madonna’s "Hollywood." We are painfully aware of
the darkness at the heart of the American dream! Yet, in How
It Ends, this clichéd landscape is seen afresh as Collins
allows us an agonising intimacy with its dizzying highs and unbearable
lows. In
this world of superficial interactions and unarticulated feelings,
it’s hard to see where Lee’s emotional anchors are.
Her relationship with Billy is a cornerstone of her psyche. This
is an intense dynamic and appears to be one of the few areas of
her life that goes beyond the superficial. Their stage performances
seem to feed from this intensity and provide the creative energy
for Anaconda. All is set to change, however, as Billy announces
that he's about to marry "some faceless creature" and
break up the band. The effects of this rupture are devastating,
triggering Lee’s spiral into psychological chaos. During the
ensuing summer, she becomes a nomad, travelling all over the world,
seeking the fulfilment of confusing emotional hungers. Carrying
the heavy burden of her fame and set adrift in an ambiguous ocean
of fame and glamour, she indulges a self-destructive yearning for
dangerous adventures. Unable to shake loose from the darkness and
ambiguity of the past, she retreats into a rock 'n' roll wonderland
of sex and drugs, and finds herself alone, her oldest friendships
threadbare and devoid of substance. Gender is a major theme. It
is clear throughout the narrative that Lee has a very jaundiced
view of men: "The way their little minds work, transparent,
twisting and turning through the same restricted options."
So strong is this sense of suspicion towards men, that one wonders
whether men are the reasons or her deep-seated neuroses. Despite
this, she seems to cling to a belief in love, "wishing there
were some men in the world that are not the men [she] always [meets]."
The
theme of fame and its effects dominates. The narrative is haunted
by the shades of Madonna and Diana and the celluloid flicker of
other ‘goddesses’ is everywhere, their tragedies and
empty triumphs providing a poignant counterpoint to Lee’s
Story: "As if he believed for an instant that he really was
sitting with Di, as if he really believed he had just fucked a princess."
(173) She name-checks Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, expressing
her perhaps subconscious need to invent herself in their image.
This yearning to self-mythologize seems shrill and neurotic. The
condition of celebrity and all its shimmering trappings is examined
in a way that makes glamour seem tawdry and notoriety ridiculous.
The novel echoes Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her
Feet in its evocation of the myth of celebrity but is altogether
more brutal and iconoclastic. In Collins’s world, Women are
valued for their beauty, packaged as commodities, deified, worshipped
and then discarded. Collins is forcing us to question a society
that values fame so highly, encouraging us to reflect on the quasi-religious
but ultimately empty interchange between star and fan. He highlights
the essentially unfulfilling nature of fame by showing us Lee in
all her tawdry glory, needy and messed up in spite of having it
all. The
narrative is darkly ironic and occasionally brutal, capturing the
remorseless spirit of Western modernity. Collins uses rich, colourful
language to evoke a world that is instantly and recognisably real
yet has the heightened colours of a cartoon. The landscape of the
novel is perfectly realised and provides a seamlessly convincing
backdrop for Lee’s unravelling. Collins's imagination is cinematic
in its attention to detail and as a reader, we trust him totally.
The writing is powerful, the use of language rich and inventive.
There are some wonderful descriptions of the squalor of Lee’s
life. The descriptions are vivid, heavily detailed and absolutely
convincing, bringing out the voyeur in all of us. Collins has a
keen eye for detail and depicts intimate situations with a shocking
accuracy: "The drummer smoothing his hardly prepossessing cock,
petting it lightly as one might a dozy snake." (171). Collins
refuses to sacrifice lyricism in his quest for the real. Occasionally,
he overworks his material, producing elaborate and obscure sentences
that break the flow of the narrative: "Farther […] all
this continental drift, reversely long sluice of night flight fending
against the swing of time. (81) Overall, he gets it right, drawing
the reader into his seamless imaginary world. This
is an entertaining and compelling read. Collins satirises modern
life with chilling precision and dark, ferocious humour, describing
an individual spinning chaotically out of control with verve and
energy. It is a novel about identity, about a woman’s torturous
journey towards self-realisation. Beneath its glittering veneer,
we can discern an old struggle, the echo of an ancient question:
who am I? When Lee says, in the middle of another loveless fuck,
"This isn’t me," (183) the line has a resonance
which echoes far beyond an in-car sexual scenario and touches on
the novel’s central theme: in a remake/remodel world where
personae can be picked up and discarded, where image is all, how
do we understand what we really are. Is there anything beneath the
surface? In
How It Ends, we hear an existential cry lost in torrents
of banality and swept away in a cascade of unnecessary product.
Hidden amongst all the superficiality, all the ruthless inhumanity,
beats a human heart. The human need to connect with others is what
makes this novel more than a mad helter-skelter ride through the
underbelly of the pop scene. Here, embodied in the bewilderment
of a woman who has apparently achieved so much, is the paradox of
modern life: that success and the fulfilment of sensual desires
do not solve the fundamental questions that life presents. Lee Annis
is a star. She knows what it is to be adored by millions yet is
a fragmented collection of unaddressed neuroses. She remains damaged
despite benefiting from all of the solutions modern Western civilisation
can offer. There’s a hopelessness in this but also a flash
of keen insight. The novel ends on an ambivalent note. The revelations
about the nature of her relationship with Billy are shocking but
somehow appropriate. We can always rely on Lee to push the limits,
probe the taboos. We like her enough to crave her redemption, to
see her lifted off this treadmill of glamour and sensation. Collins
doesn’t allow us the satisfaction of a neat conclusion. Instead,
Lee continues on her turbulent way. So how does it end?
Does Lee Annis burn out, forced to rework her greatest hot until
the lights go out and the applause fades? Will our sad, neon-drenched
life-style planet choke on its own trivia? Collins conjures the
new texture of apocalypse and gives it to us straight.
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