Resurrection man
The great harbinger of his own doom reports from the twilight zone. By Keith Cameron.
Devil In A Coma ★★★★ Mark Lanegan WHITE RABBIT. £12
IF SOME musicians are to be believed, Covid-19 hasn’t been all bad: the enforced disruption to normal routines affording valuable peace to contemplate and create with renewed vigour. Mark Lanegan’s pandemic experience has been considerably less clement. After “hellhounds at my back in Los Angeles” prompted a hasty move to rural Ireland, he knocked himself out falling down some stairs while discombobulated by coronavirus, cracking ribs and smashing an already gammy knee. Entering hospital on Saint Patrick’s Day 2021, he was put in a medically induced coma and underwent kidney dialysis. His wife Shelley refused to permit an emergency tracheotomy because it might silence his singing voice. She was advised to prepare for the worst.
None of this will much surprise those who read Lanegan’s previous memoir with a mixture of revulsion and awe. Sing Backwards And Weep presented the archetypal bad seed, the survivor of an abusive, mayhemic upbringing in eastern Washington state, who somehow escaped the drugsoaked trenches of the ’90s Seattle rock scene while his friends Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley fell. The irony that he might now succumb to an invisible killer is not lost on Lanegan, who had previously imagined a far more dramatic exit: “Plane crash, auto crash, gunfire, murder… it made me particularly angry that my life could end like this, lying in a goddamned bed, denied a battlefield.”
Although shorter than its predecessor, Devil In A Coma is still a tough, if compelling, read. Sing Backwards And Weep came leavened by Lanegan’s unlikely survival, plus much gallows humour, often at his own expense. It was also written with the benefit of 20 years’ hindsight, while his latest dance with the grim reaper is still raw in recent memory. Lanegan emerged from his medicated mezzanine to find himself immobile, assailed by delusions and unreliable memories, all of which he recounts with relentless detail in brutish prose and some eldritch poetic interludes (“the wretched carousel/revolving ever faster”). He discerns his coma dreams from reality only by being barefoot in them. “I had slept with [my boots] on for long periods of my life, in case I had to get out in a hurry.” Graciously, the book’s best line goes to an ex-girlfriend: “I really want to like you, but it’s fucking impossible.”
Upon discharging himself from hospital for a second time against medical advice (he contracted pneumonia after the first), Lanegan was told by his GP he would die unless he went straight back again. He sought a second opinion, and CT scans revealed his vital organs functioning healthily, his ongoing symptoms “common postCovid”. It’s a happy ending, albeit in very relative terms. When he eventually does sing again, Mark Lanegan has the record of a lifetime to make.