Book review: 'Damned'

Book: Damned
Chuck Palahniuk
Jonathan Cape
248 pages
Rs550

Chuck Palahniuk’s characters are no strangers to hell, but his latest one, thirteen-year-old Madison, is the first to actually make it there. She isn’t sure whether she ended up in Hell for the marijuana overdose, chronic low self-esteem, or because she’s fat, but Madison knows when she’s at a really exclusive party.

The erstwhile Who’s Who of high society (Marilyn Monroe, Genghis Khan, John F Kennedy to name a few) mingle with exotic sounding deities that would have both celebrity watchers and students of cross-cultural anthropological theology drool. Madison is quick to point this out and also other useful titbits such as: wear high heels since the “greasy Dandruff Desert,” or “the Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm” can get messy, or don’t die with a Swatch on your wrist because plastic melts in the eternal Hellfire.
Damned can be a fun read in a Lonely Planet’s Guide to Hell sort of way. Madison is a perky ironic poor little rich girl who tells you right away that Ecology Camp and Hell have much in common.
Except that everyone ends up in Hell even “if you’re still in denial, eating low-sodium, heart-healthy skinless chicken breasts and feeling all self-righteous as you jog on a treadmill…” Which is really a good thing, Madison notes, because “it’s a system not without both its comfort and its monotony.”

Comfort and monotony don’t cut it for long with a teenager. Palahniuk’s tongue-in-cheek novel is a picaresque ride through the tunnel of Horrors only to emerge with a splash on the other side. Madison is aware she may well have been mis-assigned to Hell even as she takes on the powers that be.

Undoubtedly clever, funny in bits, Damned makes Hell seem like the place you’d be dying to get into. Madison starts out as the ultimate groupie with a fun fresh voice “Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison.” She ends up repetitive and bordering on cutesy — but then she is a hostess from Hell.

Palahniuk’s Hell is like nothing you’ve imagined yet after reading Damned it’s hard to imagine it otherwise.