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Rush,
by Daniel Mason. Bantam, 2002. RRP $19.95. |
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Here's
everything you need to know: I was born and I'm going
to die.
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This
is the voice of a 21 year-old author, channelling a 30-something
year-old terminally ill man with nothing to lose.
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In
Daniel Mason's literary debut, Rush, our narrator
has been diagnosed with an incurable brain tumour. It
is this throbbing mass of cancer — combined with
his wife's suicide (and his subsequent claiming of her
life insurance) — that provides the impetus for his
journey of constantly and purposefully facing death in
the eye. Not only that, but spitting right into it.
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We
begin in Vietnam, with the chance encounter between the
walking spectre of the narrator and a HIV-positive journalist
called Hayes. Hayes introduces our narrator to the secret
Russian roulette society of Vietnam, where the game is
a spectator sport. It's after their first game together
(which, of course, the protagonist survives), that our
narrator comes to the all-important epiphany: that to
truly experience living, first one must stare into the
face of death.
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Mason's
protagonist is cold, jaded and detached, not to mention
a plainly misogynistic bastard. We all know he's going
to die, and the only questions are, when and how? More
importantly: do we care? There just doesn't seem to be
much at stake. All other key players are, almost without
exception, unceremoniously killed; most female characters
can be boiled and reduced to the same, one-dimensional
whining caricature. For all the blood spilt (and there
is a lot of it), there's nothing to cry over.
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