Introduction
Jackdaw Fool is a novel for our time. A loosely structured truly original homage to cult fiction, from Amis’s Money to Nabokov’s Lolita, the book follows the misadventures of a television critic named Iago Coakes, a flatulent ane’ crazed gluttonous man child, as he reinvents literary theory, pillages wymynkind, defiles the international space station and rampages across the continental United States, holding a mirror up to an increasingly un-sane society.
Coakes is a cartoon. A messianic superfreak, sumptuously sketched and oversaturated, he illustrates our all too vivid hyper-reality. His excesses are our excesses, his confused infantile desperation, his attacks on love and beauty and prostitutes, are our own. Fumbling in the post positivist dark, drawn to the flickering images on our haunted machines, anymore, we fuck and fight and feed, not from true visceral drives, but heightened accelerated filmic pseudomotions. We melt under the naked flame of paranoia, apart even together, huddled in texting clods for warmth, skimming citations of synopsis on aggregated feeds, fleeing the agonising realities of genocide, fanaticism and environmental self destruction in transnational corporate sponsored pseudoculture. This book abounds with references, the lingua franca of the fictive fever dream we each and separately inhabit, meeting over antimony septic water coolers to exchange ever more fragmented glimpses of nothing.
To write a novel that ignores the contemporary dysphoria is to engage in the creation of a nostalgic anachronism. Jackdaw Fool, like its protagonist, celebrates the hell of 21st century existence, throws a street party and at the stroke of midnight, stares a CCTV camera in the lens and smiling, spits. When they dragged Sid Viscous, blood stained and overdosing from the Chelsea hotel, we were complicit, we’d written the script of the soap opera that ended Nancy Spungens life. When Squeeky Fromm daubed Helter Skelter in blood and viscera on the upscale wallpaper of the Tate mansion, we all got away with murder. Who killed the hippy, burning at the Panhandle? You killed the hippy. You and me and our GPS’d, two hundred channel seat back TV, oil powered, Texas steal SUV makes three.
We bleat into the matrices, endlessly serving the culture reconstituted versions of itself, an infinitely varied dust buffet of food like edible substances. We beg the machine - notice us, hear us, watch us as we dance naked for your billion phatic eyes, let us disappear. We huddle in our fortress Europes and gated Americas, quivering as the fly eyed hordes shake the walls, crying ‘look, see here’ as we toss crumbs from the barricades and play corporate rock, paper, scissors.
We are proto Coakes, every one of us, hungry and growing ever more perverse, ominously shivering Krakatoa of andrenachrome, venom and bile. We are the rulers of the world, drunk and bloated from a thousand year feast, smug and certain of our course as we power down the highway, our children terrified and broken in the back, our ex-wife - a fresh bruise cresting her once beautiful cheek - silent in the passenger seat, she knows what’s coming.
And this is our story.
The Authors, 2008
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