sampo24's Full Review: Chuck Palahniuk - Survivor: A Novel
You want to know why I love Chuck Palahniuk? I love Chuck Palahniuk because reading his books reminds me what a vile, loathsome, terrible person I am. And it's good to confront the reality of yourself sometimes, so that you can make peace with it and move on.
Face it, the human race in general is horrible. We are all liars, thieves, cheaters and self-deluded fools. We try to portray ourselves as smarter than we are, prettier than we are, better than the next man. And we waste our time trying to convince everyone around us that we are more together than our neighbor, happier than our co-workers and our lives have more meaning than the person in the car driving next to us. We spend all our time building a facade and we work so hard to maintain it that we forget who we really are.
Palahniuk says all that and more. And that's why I love him.
Anyways, onto Survivor...
Survivor tells the tale of Tender Branson, the last known survivor of the "Creedish Death Cult". The twist is, he is recording his story on a hijacked airplane, going backwards to explain the strange machinations that got him into this predicament. The book is also numbered backwards, counting down to one and Branson's eventual suicide.
As a result, it's pretty obvious how the book is going to end. But that isn't the point of the book anyways. Because the journey that takes us there is what's more important in the long run. And Branson certainly had a strange ride getting there. Growing up among the Creedish church, he was raised to become an unpaid servant in other people's homes. Ask him anything. He can get bloodstains out of the carpet. He knows the proper way to hold a wine glass, both red and white. (I never knew that you held it differently depending on the wine.) He can teach you the best method of eating a lobster. He has more hints than Heloise. And his life is an empty, meaningless void.
Spending his time caring for others needs, serving others, Tender Branson has nothing left over for himself. His entire existence is "to serve". And not only that, he is the last member of the cult that has not completed the last duty of every good Creedish church member. All the rest in the church killed themselves in his hometown, in a scene that certainly reminds one of Waco. And those living on the outside were supposed to follow suit. And the numbers of the few survivors that haven't are slowly dwindling. The only problem is that it seems they're not all committing suicide. Someone is killing them in an attempt to fulfill the prophecy.
Throughout the book, Branson seems torn by his own inability to follow through with killing himself and knowing he should die. His Creedish "uniform", once a source of pride is now a symbol of his own failure. He doesn't have any meaning left and simply follows through with his programming to be a servant, because it's all he knows.
He can't maintain any normal relationships and spends most of the book pining after his unrequited love, Fertility Hollis, whom he met because she is the sister of a man he inadvertently killed while encouraging him (and many others) to kill himself when he called the suicide hotline that Branson runs out of his own apartment. Fertility happens to be a psychic who can predict the future. As a result, life has become very boring for her and she continues to associate with him simply because she believes that he is the only person with the ability to suprise him.
Branson's guilt and fear allow him to slide through life and the most outrageous situations. When he becomes the true last survivor, he becomes a media celebrity as a result. And he sits back and allows his agent to plan his life, because he doesn't have any idea what he should be doing next. And his life continues to spiral out of control until he finally finds himself on that airplane, ready to crash into the Australian outback, counting down into oblivion.
I think back at the book and I wonder when or if Branson ever does take real control of his life. His entire existence is one huge plane wreck. Everything is mapped out for him, not because it's destiny, but simply because he truly does not have the ability to make any real decisions for himself. As a result, he inadvertently creates the situation he's in. Although he does manage to do one thing that suprises Fertility, if he had made a decision to take control, rather than letting others tell him what to do, he probably would have suprised her a lot sooner.
In the end, though the book ends on a sudden note, (after all, what's more sudden than a plane crash?) I think it works because a book like this shouldn't answer the questions raised. It should leave us wondering what the hell just happened. Because as I said before, it's not the outcome that matters... It's the journey itself.
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