Fight Club Book Review

What a great idea! Take the Union Hotel and cross it with a gentleman’s club.  

A place to work out the angst of modern existence in a discrete environment.  Rule 1; No one can talk about Fight Club.  Rule 2; no one can talk about Fight Club. And this is the only rule that matters – so essential in the breaking.

This book works, but why? Is it senseless violence or is it the catharsis born of violence that is the key?  Who knows, but it certainly kept me turning the pages.  In the tradition of Clockwork Orange, Loaded, Trainspotting, Blood Meridian, Heart of Darkness, et. al. Chuck Palahniuk takes us into a world disintegrating.  The anarchists finally get the upper hand – and it’s great.  You have to laugh at the sheer blackness of it, and then it hits you - the sinking realisation that this is the stuff of life – shit happens and it happens regularly with no pattern or direction.  Come to terms with it or enter the ways of madness.

Tyler Durden, the master of mayhem, pulling the puppet strings of chaos, the reincarnation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Judge, or Conrad’s Mr Kurtz. He schemes, he organises - but who is Tyler Durden? Who is the narrator? Disenchanted with materialism, alienated from whatever and everything, brimming with pent up energy and about to explode. Here we have the anarchy and vigour of youth, before the stifling effects of too many drugs, career, family and etc. take their toll.  Its fantastic!
Read it.  

And then if you want to journey deeper into the darkness have a go at the following;
Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
Heart of Darkness –Joseph Conrad
Train spotting – Irvine Welsh
Loaded – Christos Tsiolkas
Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Crow – Ted Hughes
Screaming for Blood
Grubs, Crusts
Anything
Trembling featherless elbows in the nests filth

Ah, that is better, think I might head down to the Union...