Balzac of the Badlands
by Steve Finbow

Future Fiction London, 2009
ISBN: 978-0578021164

 

Reviewed by Yu-Han Chao

If there was a bookshelf in your local bookstore labeled “literary thrillers,” a few copies of Balzac of the Badlands would reside there. Somehow art-for-art’s-sake and a plot-driven page-turner at the same time, Steve Finbow’s debut novel brings together elements that do not usually share the same page: postmodern prose, a gripping mystery plot, love scenes where you can feel every stubble and touch, gangs, militants, detectives, drug smugglers, human smugglers, you name it, it’s all in there.

Balthazar Zachariah, in search of a client’s missing daughter, brings readers on a Ulysses-style tour across North London, through parks and pubs crowded with sights, sounds and smells. Finbow’s protagonist, no henpecked, cuckolded and timid Leopold Bloom, is sophisticated, suave, has a way with words as well as ladies, and has the strange ability to make dogs go crazy upon meeting their gaze. His friend the Mermaid has psychic powers that allow her to converse with people inside paintings and photographs; this ability of hers helps Balthazar get closer and closer to the bottom of an ever-thickening, unfathomable plot full of twists and turns.

Whether his scenes are of kidnapping, torture, lovemaking, or landscape, Finbow maintains his lilting, vivid style in every sentence. 

I hear gunshots. One loud and one less distinct. A crack. Then a muffled pop. Everything slows down. The darkness ripples. Corrugated. The leaves, fleshy, green and incarnate. Waves. Waves. Something flies through the trees, the papery beat of its wings heavy, getting heavier, slowing, faltering. (204-205)

The violence somehow seems less violent and more beautiful, filtered through such poetic descriptions, though when Finbow dedicates entire paragraphs to sights and colors of the landscape, he also manages to foreshadow the violence ahead with such clarity the reader can practically hear the “death knells” from bluebells and the explosions of petals and pollen:

A row of cannabis plants yields in their wake, trodden down by impatient feet, strangely human in colour. Nor does the tide spare local flora. Oxeye daisies trampled in its onslaught. The purple leaves of Devil’s-bit scabious torn and scattered. Willow-herbs rock on their skinny stems. Fleabanes burst like burning novas, their small sun heads exploding in bursts of pale pink petals, golden-yellow pollen. Bluebells ring out their own death knells, falling to the ground in heavy drops of chalk-blue and steel-lilac. (171-172)

It’s a pleasure to read such short yet descriptive sentences. It’s also reassuring, almost moving, to remember that they were written by a contemporary writer. Nabokov, Joyce, Ginsberg and Angela Carter have all passed on and become canonized, but the musicality of their style and their colorful use of words have not been buried with them. In fact, Steve Finbow himself once worked for Allen Ginsberg, something that may not surprise readers of Balzac of the Badlands.

           

But you must read the book for yourself—no mere summary of plot or ten-sentence excerpts will do the book justice. The traditional genres of literary or mainstream converge here and gives us aspiring writers and avid readers hope—that a beautifully written book of prose can at the same time be plot-driven and marketable in content.

Steve Finbow's fiction and non-fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, journals, and on literary websites. In the late 1980's, he worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg. He is an Extraordinary Senior Lecturer at North-West University, South Africa. He lives in Tokyo. A collection of his work can be found at Indifferent Multiplicities.

Yu-Han Chao is Poetry Editor at the Rose & Thorn Journal. Her poetry book, We Grow Old, was published by the Backwaters Press. Visit her writing and artwork at her Web site.