Mark Bold

It’s about halfway through Chris Bachelder’s novel Bear v Shark that the author acknowledges the need to apologise for the level of satire and the ‘whole bear porn thing’ contained in the book. He’s just oversensitive, he says, and the state of modern America, indeed the world, can only be reacted to by heightening the existing absurdity of consumer culture and our dangerously oblivious lifestyles into a ridiculous but clever satire.

But Bear v Shark does not need an apology. It uses the iconography and marketing-speak of contemporary capitalism so well that in a few years the satire may be lost on readers as the level of utter absurdity in the book feeds back into the reality it is trying to poke fun at. It cannot be long, surely, before there is an actual real Bear v Shark event, ‘based on the cult book’.

The novel has at its centre an American family who are very similar to that in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Like in that book, the children are already world-weary and repeat things they have heard on TV or read on the Internet, facts and statistics, sayings and advert jingles that have no real meaning. The father, like in DeLillo’s book, seems on the verge of a breakdown as the awareness of the absurdity around him - ’something missing’ - begins to dawn. But whereas in White Noise, the family seemed composed of humans who were in some ways reacting against the rising madness, in Bear v Shark, the characters have been gutted of their humanity, and simply react to the neon signs and unbeatable offers of consumer culture without thought.

The slim plot has the family making a journey from their home to Las Vegas, where they will watch a computer generated bear and shark fight. The heartbeat of this fictionalised American cultural landscape is the question ‘who would win a fight between a Bear and a Shark, if the playing field were level’. Every aspect of life seems hysterically preoccupied with this scenario, and its inevitable marketing tie-ins. It is an MTV Celebrity Deathmatch gone mad, making even the contest for the presidency and ’some boring war’ completely irrelevant to the lives of consumers. We can see this already when Big Brother or I’m A Celebrity… or indeed any incident involving a petty celebrity or reality show contestant knocks the occupation of Iraq or genocide in Sudan off news agendas.

Bachelder creates this nightmare world in short chapters barely ever more than two pages in length, emphasising the short attention span and lack of any real detail in a world where TV rules. The trip to Las Vegas that the Norman family are making is indeed the result of one of the children winning an essay competition, and the essay forms one of the chapters of the book, underlining the irrelevance of literacy. It is just four paragraphs short and is the output of a mind with no actual thoughts, only the ability to repeat slogans and meaningless information, and even then to stray from the point.

As the Norman family makes its journey to the Greatest Event in Recorded History, the author’s attention also wanders to give us short sketches of the surrounding absurdity. One minute the Extreme Weather channel, ‘this is what the fog sees’, another a billboard that claims ‘bottled water leads to quirky individualism’. The WorldÕs Largest Billboard seems underwhelmingly small in real life. A radio debate on abortion takes just six lines. Almost every sentence is a soundbite. All the time the voices on TV and radio and words from adverts and sponsorship smallprint overwhelm the actual words and thoughts of the characters, until they are simply moving through a fragmented, meaningless attack on all senses and meaning itself. The book maintains this distracted style throughout a tour of all aspects of an bland, throwaway, infotainment-obsessed culture and is pitched so well that the satire is at once painfully near to the bone and very funny.

Ultimately, it is an empty experience. The Normans, one of them possibly brain damaged and the rest pretty much underwhelmed and broken, sit watching the fight between the animated creatures. This is the point of the book. It is the tension caused by waiting for the showdown that sustains the consumers and the economy, the spin-offs and anticipation, the commercialisation of every aspect of existence until there is nothing else to do or think about but decide whether Bear or Shark. In its portrayal of history, culture and society being ground into a dust-substitute by corporations, the book can only be pessimistic. Read it now, before it becomes dated and its nightmare world a strangely quaint account of the good old days.