While Walker Percy is a good and perceptive writer, The Thanatos Syndrome contains a lot of sexual detail, including pedophilia, and as a result I wince slightly when I recall the book - and, while reading it, for large sections of time I could feel my face puckering up in involuntary disgust.
The main character is a psychiatrist, who was raised as a Catholic:
"My mother was a thin, hypertensive woman, perpetually worried by my father’s airy improvidence, by his playing at la vie de bohème...She was both pious and hostile. She had it both ways. If someone offended her, she sent them holy cards, notices of Masses for their ‘intentions’. What she was really saying was: ‘Even though you’ve done this rotten thing, I’m having a Mass said for you.’”
The psychiatrist believes in "the psyche", explaining:
"I became a psyche-iatrist...a doctor of the soul...I discovered that it is not sex that terrifies people. It is that they are stuck with themselves. It is not knowing who they are or what to do with themselves. They are frightened out of their wits that they are not doing what, according to experts, books, films, TV, they are supposed to be doing. They, the experts, know, don’t they?"
As the book is a sequel and I haven't read the initial book, I am unable to tell you why, at the novel’s beginning, the protagonist has just finished a prison term. It seems odd, as he is one of the few characters in the book who does nothing appalling - possibly this is testament to the efficacy of penal detention, but I don’t think so.
The story is set in Lousiana and concerns an attempt by a charlatan colleague of the psychiatrist to manipulate the population's cerebral cortex by adding something to the water. The charlatan refers to fluoridation and AIDS, in attempts to justify his actions, but there is no justification for what he tries to do.
There are some beautiful descriptive passages:
"Nothing could look less sinister than the gentle golden light of Louisiana autumn, which is both sociable and sad, casting shadows from humpy oaks across a peopled park, boys and girls in running suits gold and green, a bus loading up with day students, and the playing fields beyond, youth in all the rinsing sadness of its happiness, bare-legged pep-squad girls flourishing in sync banners as big as Camelot, boys in a pickup game of touch coming close to the girls both heedless and mindful.”
and Percy writes perceptively and with good observation, (his proxy, the narrator explains: "Living a small life gave me leave to notice small things.”) When Percy describes someone thus: “There is a space between what he is and what he is doing. He is graceful and conscious of his gracefulness, like an actor”, I feel he has really captured a certain kind of person, one who is preoccupied above all with themselves and the effect they have on others.
Similarly, when he has his main character buy a bartender a drink, this observational passage strikes me as spot on:
“He drinks like a bartender: as one item in the motion of tending bar,wiping, arrangig glasses, pouring the drink from the measuring spout as if it were for a customer, the actual drinking occurring almost invisibly, as if he had rubbed his nose, a magician’s pass."
The narrator tells us at one point:
"I was reading a new history of the Battle of the Somme, a battle which, with the concurrent Battle of Verdun, seemed to me to be events marking the beginning of a new age, an age not yet named. In the course of these two battles, two million young men were killed, toward no discernible end”
This signals fairly obviously the author’s preoccupation with the First World War. This preoccupation is made explicit again when an alcoholic priest character called Simeon declares that: “the world really ended in 1916 and we’ve been living in a dream ever since”.
Simeon, it turns out, was present at the liberation of a World War Two concentration camp. His insight from that experience is that:"We’ve got it wrong about horror: it doesn’t come naturally but takes some effort.” Simeon also declares that it is tenderness that leads to the gas chambers and claims that his: “is the secret of all alcoholics: that the bottle enabled me to enjoy my spite.”
As may be obvious from my rather cursory approach to it, I did not enjoy this book. As I’ve already explained there are some fairly graphic descriptions of sexual activity with children and I am too squeamish to take any pleasure from a text containing those.
As I am always interested in food in fiction, I should note that I was cheered by the one Southern meal that is described in the novel. Here it is, for what it’s worth:
"Breakfast in the old dining room is a meal of quail, grits, beaten biscuits, fried apple rings, and the same bowl-size cups of chicoried coffee."
I should also perhaps highlight this disquisition on death from Simeon:
"Do you know the one thing dying people can’t stand? It’s not the fact they’re going to die. It’s other people, the undying, so-called healthy people. Their loved ones. And after a while of course their loved ones can’t stand the sight of them, haven’t a word to say to them, and they can’t stand the sight of their loved ones. They liked me, because I liked them, and they knew it. You can’t fool children and you can’t fool dying people. We were in the same boat. They knew I was a drunk, a failed priest. Dying people, suffering people, don’t lie. They tell the truth. Death makes honest men of all of us. Everyone else lies. Everyone else is dying too and spending their entire lives lying to themselves. I’ll tell you a peculiar thing: It makes people happy to tell the truth after a lifetime of lying."
I bought the book for 30p from the shop where I used to buy books for 20p (an example of the rise in the cost of living, for those in the market for such things). I have never done such a thing with a book but on this occasion, as I’d only spent such a small amount of money on it, I threw it in the dustbin when I’d finished it. I suppose that’s a bit Fahrenheit 451, but I did not want it on my shelves, knowing some of the things it contained. I wish I could now get them out of my memory.
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