A
couple of months ago, I was asked in a radio interview to name the three books I would save from the
apocalypse for ‘the library at the end of days.’ The first two picks would be
familiar to any readers of horror or science fiction: Ray Bradbury’s The October Country and Joel Lane’s Where Furnaces Burn. The third, The Therapy of Avram Blok, is one of my
favourite books, although it’s very different from anything I’ve ever written
or probably could write.
When They arrested Avram
Blok for peeping on 27th November 1967, the judge of the Jerusalem
District Court, Justice Henrietta Ben-Horin, sent him to the Moses Klander
Institute for twenty-eight days of observation…
I
first picked this book up in Woolworths, of all places, where you could buy
lots of remaindered books for 99p. This was back in the 1980s, when I had three
quid a week pocket money, so in those days you took what you could get. I like
to think I’ve been pretty good at turning straitened financial circumstances to
advantage – lord knows, I’ve had plenty of practice over the years – and one
example of that is how I ended up reading a lot of odd and off-the-wall stuff.
Therapy is the first of several
novels Simon Louvish wrote about the character of Avram Blok. Louvish is a cineaste
and former London Film School tutor, better known for his biographies of
comedians such as W.C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy. In between all that, he has
produced a wholly idiosyncratic body of fiction: irreverent, funny, clever,
dark, surreal, interweaving slapstick comedy with myth, legend, conspiracy
theory, politics, metaphor, SF and pulp fiction, and nowhere, perhaps, are his
skills more wonderfully showcased than in The
Therapy of Avram Blok.
Blok is the child of Rosa and Baruch, two Hungarian Jews,
born on a refugee ship bound for what was then Palestine under the British
Mandate. Growing up in the newly-created State of Israel, he’s a likeable,
funny and recognisable figure: in a world where everyone is clamouring for him
to fill this or that niche, fulfil this or that expectation, he is
‘troublemaker, dissenter and non-hero of our time.’
Listen, Vicky, he wished to say, I have had my quota of
wars. The bodies, rotting in sand. Their reek, like a burst gas balloon. Velly
solly, lady, no cannon fodder I, for idealist pie in the sky. No Blokkian
precedent for commitment. On the contrary – remember Baruch Blok, keeping his
head down through the firestorm? Surviving to breathe the air of another day
another era, for which countless millions had died… and what was its face, this
new dawn? What phoenix of the human spirit? More like a chicken, starved and
wretched, yearning for the chopping block…
Fleeing
his homeland for the fleshpots of Europe and America, he falls in (unrequited)
love, tries to get laid (and occasionally succeeds), experiments with drugs,
hobnobs with Black Panthers and radicals, accidentally gets caught up in the
1968 Paris evenements and is hunted
by the French police, and sundry other adventures before returning to
Jerusalem.
Having
seen his share of service in the Six Day War, he is busted when he looks in
through the window of his high school crush and instead spies the new
occupants, an Orthodox couple, on the job.
He meant, it was not quite a sight for sore eyes: Mr
Friedman, his sweaty black beard and the Mrs, with a face like a bunch of
garlic cloves, patchy hair and a glass eye. Though they went at it hammer and
tongs… still, it was not a vision conducive to erotic emotion by any stretch of
the imagination… Another second and he would have run, Blok swore blind,
putting as great a distance as possible between himself and this dire
apparition but, before he could so much as turn, the heavy hand of Patrolman
Abutbul, uniformed minion of the Law of Jerusalem City, descended on his
shoulder…
And,
as a result, he finds himself committed for observation to the Klander
Institute, an asylum in the hills above Jerusalem which proves to be the
nearest thing to an oasis of calm and sanity that Blok can find.
And
all this is barely scratching the surface.
The
book isn’t told in anything approaching a linear fashion, leaping about in time
with gay abandon, both in Blok’s past and those of the many colourful
supporting characters: Nietszche, the Klander Institute’s ‘eminent inhabitant’,
who claims to be the reincarnation of the deceased philosopher; Blok’s father
Baruch, a wonderfully irascible abstainer from involvement in anything he can
avoid, much like his son; his devoutly religious mother Rosa; the Black Panther
Wellington Frog; the roguish jeep-driver Sa’id and his alter-ego Yehoshuah; the
obsessive Police Inspector Tarablus; Blok’s sometime lover, Nurse Nili-Honey;
the kleptomaniac Magpie; Davidov, the Klander Institute’s manic and exuberant
‘fixer’; the fanatical nationalist Colonel Zetz; the mournful commando Eisav;
spy and pornographer Liam O’Habash – and
many, many, many, many more.
And
we haven’t even touched on the tale of the Judas Pig, a bizarre porcine
apparition believed to be the demonic spirit of Judas Iscariot. Or the
decades-old hunt for the murderer of Moses Klander, the Institute’s Founder.
Or the savagely funny passages set during Blok’s experience in the Six Day War.
Or the story of The Man Who Counted The Spectacles And Gold Teeth At Auschwitz.
And did I mention the time travel?
Blok, hitting upon a desperate plan to a put a mark on
history… the two of them arriving at Braunau-am-Inn, July 1888, with a clutch
of noise-making devices: a klaxon motor horn, a Purim rattle and a plastic
Independence Day hammer. Hiding as night fell by the window of Alois and Klara
Hitler, Schillerstrasse 23. Intent, by use of implements thereof, to interrupt
the attempts of the good burgher and his spouse to conceive their baby boy,
Adolf. Rattling on the windowpane at the first signs of nookie, raising Cain to
cause instant shrivel…
Throw
into all of this a plot and host of sub-plots containing Soviet spies, talking
cockroaches, a network of underground tunnels, a delightfully chaotic wedding,
several musical numbers (I shit thee not), The Great Anti-Wagner Demo Of ’68,
and the Elders of Zion (not the evil manipulators of anti-Semitic myth, but a
coven of Jewish mystics tasked with predicting the coming of the Messiah), and
you might have an idea of what a bizarre ride you’re in for.
The Therapy Of Avram Blok is so full of story, ideas
and characters it’s practically coming apart at the seams, and its
free-wheeling language and structure is all part of the ride; the form shifts
into script, song, poetry, into wild ranting monologues, and it’s dizzying and
wonderful. It’s almost impossible to convey the experience of reading this
novel, and I mean that in a wholly good way. Perhaps that’s why Louvish’s
novels aren’t better known, as they deserve to be: it’s very difficult, in any
review or précis, to fully communicate what a tremendously pleasurable reading
experience they are.
You
should read The Therapy of Avram Blok because
it’s funny as hell, because it’s angry, because it’s surreal. But most of all
you should read The Therapy of Avram Blok
because it’s a brilliant novel, rich and thick of full of characters,
ideas, ingenuity and ambition that reminds you just what a novel can do. Which
is far, far more than what we’re used to.
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