A Million Versions of Right by Matthew Revert
The stories in Matthew Revert’s A Million Version of Right lurch along at a gravitas-defying rate. From the Freudian psychosis of the title story to the outrageously self-reflexive “Bookmark That Didn’t Work,” Revert’s Antipodean styling is a shot in the arm to weird writing everywhere.
If you are reading this review then you probably already know what Bizarro is—a dream of the weird made flesh by a group of US small press publishers working out of Portland and Seattle. Dr Seuss of the Apocalypse. Kafka meets John Waters. However, Revert has said that his writing is less bizarro in the uniquely American sense of what’s weird, and more absurdist in the Down Under irrealist tradition. Spike Milligan of the Wasteland, perhaps, or Dante meets the Wiggles. There is a sweet-natured under Capricorn sensibility to these stories that somehow escapes categorization. They flatulate affectionately in the general direction of the Bizarro tradition while clearly influenced by it. Take the sadistic tradesman birthed from the guilty ejaculations of a lonely son. Or, in “The Great Headphone Wank,” the day-job drone paid to yell obscenities at troubled walls to test their emotional fortitude. To my mind, the funniest, most acutely observed piece in the collection is “The Bricolage Scrotum”—in which the small community of Yandish Muff is torn apart by a battle between the radical Scroats and the anti-Scrotum status quo. Yar—this stuff is not just Bizarro, not just weird, but has the balls-to-the-wall vision of a potty-mouthed Pynchon, or an early Kotzwinkle, and owes much to Spike Milligan, who haunts every page.
Between the fart jokes and wank fairies, talk show hosts called Blimey Stinksnatch and nightmarish Whovilles formed entirely from faeces, AMVoR delivers a side-splittingly adolescent yet superbly crafted commentary on 21st century absurdities such as the ankle-biter industry, which fatuously diagnoses the child Angela with ‘what was known as Fast Body.’ And a band-aid covers a multitude of over-servicing sins in “Power Blink.”
“‘ In the case of exceptionally mild injury, such as what we’re facing with Patrick here, the process is wonderfully redundant, carried out none-the-less to the utmost precision.”’
In “The Bookmark that Wouldn’t Work,” a researching Big Wig is awarded the annual P.I.S.S prize (Performance in Scientific Studies), which ‘he dedicated to the memory of the good men and women who died for the dream.’ ‘Production on commercial bookmarks’ we’re told, ‘began immediately.’
AMVoR leaves no plastic dog turd unturned as its scarily recognizeable characters scuttle about popping each other’s junk, reading books entitled “On Why I’m Cumming’ and glued to the sounds of one hand wanking. Seems that according to the gospel of A Million Version of Right, if you’re not cumming or wanking, or at the very least hoeing into a welt-burger, you’re nobody. Funny that.
