Chemical relief
What distinguishes a novel from a designer drug? Words alone, in the case of British writer Ned Beauman’s third book, “Glow.”
Readers of Beauman’s previous novel, “The Teleportation Accident” may anticipate a more disciplined performance, line by line, than “Glow” offers. But this epically digressive saga follows Raf, a young South London raver, who stumbles on a multinational corporation’s shift from mining to dissemination of a customized hallucinogen, street name “glow”: falsely rumored to be “a mixture of speed, monosodium glutamate, and an experimental social anxiety disorder medication for dogs.”
Beauman’s prose is a mixture of speed, filigreed narration and Pynchon-esque social satire, yielding the funniest fiction about drug chemistry since Stanislaw Lem’s “The Futurological Congress” (1973).
Raf has a sleep disorder, from which he unavailingly seeks chemical relief, that puts him out of sync with the world. It chimes with slippages between reality and simulation, true and false intrigue and narrative dodges that make the unfolding novel fan like a deck from a cardsharp’s hand.
Raf’s friend Isaac “had been looking around ... for a site that would sell him dried psilocybin mushrooms by post when he’d come across one that instead sold fresh Gyromitra esculenta, a type of false morel used in Finnish cookery. Isaac is fascinated by these false morels, firstly because they are pinkish, bilobed and furrowy like a human brain, and secondly because they contain a precursor chemical called gyromitrin, which breaks down in the liver to a toxin called monomethyl-- hydrazine, which was a component of the hypergolic propellant used in the Apollo Lunar Modules.”
But following a nearly fatal trial run, “Isaac learned from a message-board that … the site from which he’d ordered false morels wasn’t selling real false morels but instead real morels falsely advertised as false morels. Real morels, which are harmless ascocarps used in Provençal cuisine, do contain hydrazine, which was a rocket fuel used in the Nazis’ experimental Messerschmitt 163, but the problem is that they contain it from the very beginning, without the intervention of human biochemistry, which doesn’t excite Isaac.”
When Bezant, Australian CEO of the sinister Lacebark Corp., briefly appears, he is “a pillar of tungsten and steaks, and he would have made any normal product of the human genotype feel like a fiddly new model … miniaturized by some clever Japanese company to fit better into the handbags of teenage girls.”
Lacebark has retooled its London operation, Raf discovers, not just with an eye to a coming rage for glow, but because the drug requires synthesis from its organic precursor, the Burmese plant “glo,” through digestion by foxes, which abound in London and in the novel.
“Glow” burns with inventive energy, generating a dark vision but much delight.