Mark Bold

All the way through Voltaire’s Candide, the argument of ideas and philosophies such as Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man are ridiculed and repeatedly proved wrong. ‘One truth is clear, whatever is, is right’ ends Epistle I of Pope’s poem describing humankind’s sovereign place in the great chain of being, and the perfect arrangement of all aspects of existence that creates the best of all possible worlds. God, the supposed designer of everything, had apparently made no mistakes, and it was the blind satisfaction of believers and the theodicean excuses formulated by apologist clergy that Voltaire wanted to correct. He takes on the arrogant optimism and dispels it without wasting many words.

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“Think of two parallel lines,” he said. “One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It’s not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It’s a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path to his destiny.”‘ [p339]It is this path to Lee Harvey Oswald’s destiny that Don DeLillo’s novel Libra explores. Recreating the dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, the deepest levels of the self of his protagonist is a monumental task, and develops into an amazingly rich study of character as well as a tightly plotted thriller.

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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’.

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