What do you do when your Magnum Opus has been rejected? What do you do when the laughter of mockery is ringing in your ears? When failure is upon you, when you realize that you are not Rimbaud, but Verlaine, when the past is kicking you in the butt and your poor eyesight has lost the future—what do you do when you finally realize you have been cancelled? You wait for the inevitable War to kick off and join your very own Einsatzgruppen! Come meet the ordinary men—butcher, sales manager, plumber, bank manager—come face to face with, not monsters, but mundane chaps with receding hairlines, potbellies, dodgy legs, unattainable sexual fantasies and minds filled with bubbling conspiracies and fears—get to know them, see their development, experience their education, see how far they will follow their Leader, and enter their dark catacombs. For these men War was created.
Notices
“This is a War novel, more accurately, an Anti-War novel, but written with such coruscating, and excoriating, scabrous and scatological wit and brio as to make it an anti-Anti-War novel. How to describe it? As like Céline on steroids? Blood Meridian with erudite jokes? That doesn’t even come close. Try an art simile: Jackson Pollock’s War crossed with Philip Evergood’s Renunciation. Give up. You will just have to read it for yourselves. And no pigeons were injured in its writing.”
—David Rose, author of Interpolated Stories
“Kavanagh reads like a picayune of poets and a nutsack of Hemingway’s engaged in a bloody beerbrawl with gutter saints, spittoon scientists, rabble-rousers, has-been fascists, tech bros on cyanide and trashbin John Henry’s. Read this book if you have survived the revolution only by being exiled to Cyberia. Or read the damn thing anyway—like the Parmesan said to the stainless steel, it’s grate!”
—Willie Smith, author of Oedipus Cadet
Paul Kavanagh was born in 1971 in England. He is the author of the novels The Killing of a Bank Manager (Honest Publishing, 2011) and Iceberg (Honest Publishing, 2012).