The human body is a strange place: a warm meeting room for sensation pleasure and impulse; an only sometimes controllable vehicle; an inescapable house; and the intersection where decay disease and discomfort reveal themselves as our frequent companions. David Cronenberg cut a career out of the last decades of the 20th century by exploring the horrors met by the body’s distortions and mutations then shifted his gaze in this millennium to similar distortions of the mind. His debut novel Consumed brings fans back to the realm of the body as it fuses with the near-psychoses of our media-saturated present where our voracious consumption of technology and commodity itself consumes meaning.
We shouldn’t be surprised that a novel has appeared in a long career of prolific filmmaking; prior to taking his place as one of Canada’s foremost auteurs Cronenberg studied literature at the University of Toronto. He has displayed a particular arcane taste for transgressive literature adapting William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and J.G. Ballard’s Crash into two of cinema’s most puzzling anomalies. Consumed is an unsettling and thrilling though sometimes sensational amalgamation of a career-long prodding of human depths.
In Paris the French intellectual world is shocked by the horrific murder and dismemberment of the philosopher Célestine Arosteguy whose remains appear to have been eaten; her husband and fellow philosopher Aristide Arosteguy has vanished and is the prime suspect. The novel follows journalists Naomi Seberg and Nathan Math — a couple in the loosest sense — as they pursue seemingly separate assignments through Europe Asia and Canada: Naomi combing Paris and Tokyo for the Arosteguy story Nathan documenting a shady medical procedure in a Budapest industrial suburb.
As the pair dig deeper frightening parallels begin to emerge and disturbing occurrences involving cannibalism mutilation and amputation make themselves known through a bizarre cast of characters: the sly Hervé Blomqvist a resourceful ex-student of the Arosteguys and sufferer of Peyronie’s disease; Zoltán Molnár dubious surgeon and casual specialist of nude photographs (his choice subjects being his patients); Barry Roiphe founder of Roiphe’s disease an extinct STD; and Roiphe’s daughter Chase whose strange beauty is offset by her self-styled “consumption.”
A sense of unease and suspense pervades the novel interrupted by a parade of images from the body horror canon: Cronenberg fans may rejoice as he resumes a bombardment of the senses that halted after eXistenZ his 1999 film that featured such oddities as organic video game consoles and a gun made from cooked animal bones. In Consumed the reader is subjected to feverish visions of venereal disease apotemnophilia self-cannibalism and an assortment of fetishes surrounding surgery growths and deformities.
Naomi and Nathan are tech-obsessed Google-crazed sexually liberated shutterbugs whose dedication to the cult of consumerism — where brand loyalty is described as “shared sex-tech” — intertwines with their exploration of their own (and others’) bodies. Cronenberg meticulously documents brand and model numbers saturating the text with these microcosms. This is a story about the body yes; it is also a story about the technology that has become an extension of the body — always attached and sometimes merged.
The Arosteguys are dedicated Marxists; their critical explorations of capitalism expressed in such books as Labor Gore: Marx and Horror intersect terrifyingly with the dismembered and half-eaten Célestine Arosteguy whose demise is frequently and graphically described (this isn’t a read for the queasy). The horrors of the body meet loudly and often with dizzying descriptions of tablets smartphones laptops and cameras essential appendages of a culture that buys itself into annihilation: a pointed dissection of the meaning of the word “consumed.”
Consumed by David Cronenberg Hamish Hamilton (288 pp).
