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Title: Cows by Matthew Stokoe ISBN: 1-84068-005-9 Publisher: Creation Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Staring vacantly into space repeating best...book...ever...
Comment: Matthew Stokoe, Cows (Creation Books, 1997)
I'm not normally one to preface a review, or even mention in a review, when a book is not appropriate for certain audiences. (I hope to have duped a few of the weak-stomached into reading, say, Peter Sotos or Pan Pantziarka, because they deserve being read). But I'm going to start this one by saying, quite bluntly, Cows is not for everyone. In fact, Cows may not be for anyone. It is scatological, offensive, disgusting, filled to the brim with sex, violence, and sexual violence, and is probably capable of inciting nausea in those who are perfectly capable of sitting through atrocity footage and watch driving school videos for fun.
Cows is also visionary, brilliant, amazingly complex, a must on my ten best reads of the year list, and the second full-length piece of fiction I have finished in less than twenty-four hours this year. It's not only so nasty you can't look away, but it is supremely, blindingly great.
Matthew Stokoe's debut novel can best be summarized as follows. Take a healthy dollop of Horatio Alger (tempered with a dash of Alger Hiss), mix in a good dose of China Mieville's King Rat, a shot of Robert Bloch, add a couple of jiggers of Peter Sotos, ten drams of Camus, two shakes of David Mamet, bung in a couple of PETA ads of the most offensive variety, and then dump the whole mess into a shaker lined with Stewart Home. Shake, chill, and serve over ice cubes laced with LSD, rat poison, and Hideshi Hino films. One taste and you have scraped the tip of the iceberg that is Cows.
Steven, the protagonist, is not a happy person. His paraplegic dog, named Dog, was crippled years back by his mother, known affectionately throughout as the Hagbeast. He's twenty-five years old, and the only time he's left the flat is to run up to the roof and stare out over the city (presumably London) and imagine what life is like for normal people. After the roof got old, he started watching television obsessively, coming to believe that American sitcom families from the fifties led normal lives, and guaging happiness by those standards. As the novel opens, Steven is on his way to his first day of work, ever, at a slaughterhouse. He has a new upstairs neighbor named Lucy, who just moved in and after whom he lusts, a foreman named Cripps who takes maybe a bit too much of a fatherly interest in Steven, and something watching him from the ventilation system in the slaughterhouse.
As if that's not enough, Lucy is convinced that all the poisons in human beings (mucous, excrement, etc.) are to be found in large black lumps mixed in with the organs, and ceaselessly dissects things trying to find them; Steven is convinced the Hagbeast is trying to kill him by feeding him undercooked pork; the thing in the vents is getting more insistent; Cripps wants to teach Steven the ins and outs of cow-killing. Life, to say the least, is a mess for Steven, until everything falls into place at once and he begins to understand who he really is.
On the surface, Cows is an exceptionally offensive novel. It doesn't take too much analysis, though, to realize that the offense here is aimed with a deadly precision, and Stokoe weighed every word carefully in order to smack the reader into wakefulness throughout. Once you've understood that, unearthing the subtleties underneath becomes that much easier. Steven is a fantastically-drawn character whose emotions are never less than real (though as Guernsey tells him, there's nothing at all normal about Steven; that we can identify with him at all is a work of literary mastery). The rest of the characters are all caricatures of some sort (one is tempted to map them onto the seven deadly sins in a piece of textual analysis), but despite this are are very well presented and, with the exception of the Hagbeast (who is drawn as completely evil) empathetic; Cripps may be a power-hungry perverted moron, but there's enough of the father figure in him for us to see him, briefly, as Steven must after first meeting him, for example. The situations and the characters are all throughly blown out of proportion, but the grittiness with which Stokoe sets his scenes makes his dystopian vision as real to the reader as the backdrops of Ridley Scott's marvelous film Balderunner.
None of this is truly astounding; many of the same strengths can be found in much of Creation's output (these same strengths, for example, are what make Pantziarka's House of Pain so much more readable than Jeremy Reed or the erotic novels of Anne Rice, for example). Where Stokoe truly transcends is in the tenderness with which he treats Steven's odd love triangle, and the subtle power struggle between Steven and Guernsey through the latter half of the novel. Ultimately, whatever the message one takes away from the book (the late Kathy Acker, for excample, brandished it as a banner for the vegan movement), at its core are those relationships.
You will either love Cows or hate it. You will emerge from it disgusted, mystified, or both. But you will not read Cows and finish it unchanged. D>Tour magazine called Cows "the Wasp Factory of the nineties." Whether Stokoe will achieve the same status that Banks has is a long way from being seen, but it is impossible to deny that Cows is a deeply moving, very important novel that should not be missed. (...)
Rating: 2
Summary: I thought it'd be fun, but....
Comment: "Oh wow, most disgusting book ever? Sounds like fun!"... Not really. It starts out nice. The violence and general grossness (very convincingly evocative s--t eating scenes, for example) are believable and serve the book's insightful and poignant moral focus. It's a nice portrait of alienation and the counterproductive allure of fantasy. About halfway through things get cartoony and implausible; inconsistent even within the novel's exaggerated atmosphere. The moral compass get's lost and the main character becomes very difficult to empathize with. The author seems to start revelling in the disturbing stuff for its own sake. I read the book straight through, and when it was over, I WAS completely disgusted. Not if a fun "Ewww, gross!!" kind of way, and not by the violence and bestiality, all of which had an air of cartoony un-realism despite the convincing details. I was pretty disgusted with myself for eagerly going along with the ride even after I recognized how hollow and basically amoral it was. That sounds a little melodramatic as I type it now, but I really did feel spiritually disappointed in myself when I finished. It was genuinely unpleasant and depressing. Disgusting: yes- fun: no- enlightening: no.
Rating: 4
Summary: Effect of COWS
Comment: This book was one of the first graphic novels I've read. It's definitely one of those books you'd read solely for the disgusting acts that happen inside it and not for the actual plot.
The deaths in this book are grand. From the death of people to the death of animals, all seem to only excel in gruesome detail from the last. Each death goes up a notch until the end of the book to at that point you just shake your head, take a break from the book, and if you liked it after all you've just read, you have to read it again.
It's also one of the books to where I quote lines and acts to people of not such a corrupted mind. Watch everyone's faces drop in horror when you talk about what he does with and TO his mother aka The Hagbeast! VERY GOOD BOOK.
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