Customer Reviews

And the Ass Saw the Angel (Essential Penguin)

5 star:		(49)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Having arrived late on the Nick Cave bandwagon, I spent several years listening closely to his albums and finally decided it was time to take a crack at the book to which there are many allusions in his music. For example, Crow Jane, a character from one of Cave's most violent songs, is re-introduced here as the vile woman who whelped the hapless narrator, Euchrid Eucrow. So first I read the reviews, and then I tackled the actual book itself.

Is "And The Ass Saw The Angel" hard to read? Yes. Are there made-up words? Yes. But then there are many novels, great and not so great, that are both hard to read and that contain many seeming nonsense words and phrases. On reading Cave, I think of Faulkner (made-up places and words), Flannery O'Connor (particularly the parallels with her novel Wise Blood), and of H. P. Lovecraft, whose novels and short stories are packed with the kind of degenerates who people Cave's Ukulore Valley. Many of the words that Cave uses, and may be accused by some of inventing, are not inventions at all but rather are either obscure or archaic words. Some of the actually invented words are agglutinations of two or three real words, so put together as to make more vivid the idea being expressed. Cave is obviously a master wordsmith and his command of English demands a similar level of erudition from his readers. One of those hefty dictionaries seen in university libraries just might be needed by some.

The story itself is populated by all the lowest, most degenerate and filthy specimens of humanity imaginable. Narrator Euchrid Eucrow, born mute, is himself the unwholesome and wretched spawn of diseased loins. It is telling that the Ukulore Valley's most sympathetic characters are the town whore and the daughter she bore in death.

The Ukulites themselves are above the others at the start, the God-chosen masters of the valley. Hard-working, God-fearing, and sober, only they have a real future there and a stake in the status quo. Everyone else is there to be used when needed, but officially ignored otherwise. I don't know about other readers, but though this novel is putatively set somewhere in the American South, I detect a whiff of Brigham Young and the Mormons about the Ukulites story. Cave knows his Bible, and this book is replete with Biblical quotations and allusions.

I don't want to ruin the story by telling it here, but suffice to say it is a brutal, bloody, filthy, vulgar and sometimes hilarious mockery of bigotry and religious zealotry. Euchrid, rejected and abused by all and sundry because of his origins and his condition, retreats into the confines of his ramshackle, jerry-built Kingdom of Doghead and plots revenge on all who have made his life sheer misery. How it all ends is a comic surprise.

And The Ass Saw The Angel is not a bad literary debut for a man best known as a songwriter. The story and the language betray Cave's longtime fascination with the American South. And this is where it really loses a star. Cave tries to make his characters sound "southern" by having the narrator (Euchrid Eucrow) say words like "ah", mah" and "unnerstand" in place of proper English enunciation, but then he often forgets that mid-sentence and lapses into Standard English or sometimes even lets loose with a bit of Aussie slang! Cave or his editors should have been more careful. But though the book is filled with graphic descriptions of human and animal cruelty of the basest sort, intrepid readers who are not literal-minded may find this to be a very engrossing novel noir indeed. Four bright stars and may Cave write soon again!

For many a day I pined for this sublime piece of work, dismayed to find out it was no longer being published in America. Amazon never did find it in any used bookstores and I thought it hopeless. Until I went to Amazon.co.uk -- and I bought it! It arrived at my door within three days, and within one week it was read, digested, and placed at the very top of my favorites list. It's even more divine and awesome (and I mean awesome as in AWE-INSPIRING) than I could've ever imagined. You're sucked into Euchrid's mad, tortured world, sometimes believing his delusions to be reality and sometimes wishing they were reality for his sake. The empathy that pours forth from the reader while Euchrid's tale is told is so powerful and overwhelming -- I can't even begin to describe how I felt while reading this book. And the ending -- the ending! All I can say is that it's a masterpiece. The bitterness towards religious fanaticism is so sweet -- at least it was for me. I'm very bitter towards religion and Christianity, and this book just seemed to justify it. So here's a suggestion if you want to read this book and can't find it anywhere: go to Amazon.co.uk and look it up. It may take a little longer to come in, but believe me it will be well worth it.

As a long time fan of Mr. Cave's my expectations of his debut novel were high. Considering this I never would have thought it would draw such emotion from the reader. His hero is a demon who begets empathy unwillingly. This novel is strong enough to provoke nightmares and make the hardiest reader reflect on the human condition at it's worst and most pathetic.

...read it again. This book is complicated. One of the hardest I've ever read. Most of it is written in sort of a southern accent mixed with gothic poetry. I don't think I've ever read anything like it. Parts are so disgusting you almost have to "look away."

I was basically blown away by this book. The way he describes the scenery and the things that go through the main character, Euchrid's mind is amazing. Admittedly, I am a huge fan of The Bad Seeds. But I am also a fan of thousands of other music groups and I don't think you necessarily have to be a fan of Nick Cave's music to appreciate this book. However, I stress this again: it is very graphic.

Do not think that this book is an example of yet another muso jumping on the publishing bandwagon. It seems Nick Cave is indeed a writer, the eeriness of his music permeating his fiction.

This is a work probably best associated with the Southern Gothic genre, telling the story of one particular misfit born to hellish, abusive, inbred, violent parents in a hellish, inbred, abusive town. There are scourges of God, religious fanatics (a cult particular to the book's setting), hobos, violence, cruelty and all you'd expect. And all is told with an almost prophetic Biblical tone, with infinite foreboding and dark overtones. A great first novel from Nick Cave!

The only reason there aren't 5 stars is that his language is a bit too poetic. Most of the story is in first person, and the narrator is not all quite there - great premise and execution but it sometimes makes it hard to know what actually happened. Perhaps Cave was aiming for this - he certainly aims to unsettle - and succeeds spectacularly.

In any case, not to be missed by anyone with a dark side...

This is the first and only novel written by Nick Cave, one of the world's most acknowledged songwriters, best known as a rock artist in the groups "The Birthday Party" and "The Bad Seeds." Having said so, readers who are acquainted with his lyrics will be in a better position to appreciate his writing. The author literally locked himself up in a room for three years to write this novel, by some considered a "masterpiece."

The setting is a fictional Southern town with a population marked by religious fanaticism, ruled by the "Ukelites" (based on a real life sect called the Morisites). The main protagonist is a young fellow by the name of Euchrid Escrow, mute, physically handicapped, and subject to epileptic fits. He lives in a world of evil, ignorance, where he takes the role of an outcast. In order to survive he camouflages his feelings, and from a passive role he eventually becomes an avenger with fantasies of grandeur and of God's emissary to this world. His complete alienation will result in inevitable madness.

This is an extremely disturbing, macabre tale, marked by brutality. Not even its "poetic" prose verging on the baroque will bring relief to the reader. Nick Cave certainly knows his Bible, and the title of this novel is to be found in Numbers 22, 23-31 where the story is been told of how Balaam failed to see the angel of the Lord. There is extensive use of parables and metaphors, although the author himself claims that this novel should not be seen as a parable.

The style is unique, far from academic, where slang, abusive language, biblical quotations, masterful wording, and an alien language are all tools used by Nick to create an atmosphere in which, as quoted by the author "it is very exciting sort of thing to write about things that are not morally correct." Be it correct or not, the fact remains that his obsession with the grotesque makes this novel not an easy "pill to swallow!" Certainly not for the faint of heart!

Do not hesitate to the buy this piece of art, a stinkin gangrenous stump of angels thigh.. a force of the blackest applejack inked art you'll ever hear screeched. Nick Cave writes like a combine harvester running over fields a bodies, beautiful..

This book proved to me that Nick Cave is not only an excellent songwriter but that he is also able of writing a whole novel. What I like of this book is that the main character lives in his own reality which is probably quite different from the reality of the other characters in the book. The way the book is written is also interesting, the main character has an unusual use of language which irritated me a lot in the beginning of the book. Luckily I came to appreciate it later on. Read this book if you like swamps, misunderstood people and a lot of dirt.

Well, it took me long enough to find this book, but after much searching, I managed to get my greedy little hands on a British first edition which had never been read (if that's not a rarity, I don't know what is!). All I can say is Brilliant. This novel reads like a sprawling epic song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, very rooted in the theme of their 1985 classic, "Tupelo" which proclaims "The firstborn is dead," "a child is born at his brother's heels," "a bottle and a box and a cradle of straw," etc. All of these elements and elements from Cave songs, released before and after ATASTA, show up here. Nick adapts his writing style to the medium of the novel with stunning ease and quickly sucks you into his twisted vision. I know that this book is extremely difficult to find, but if you can get hold of a copy, don't ever let go...it's priceless.

After following NC's musical work for many years and then recently reading his novel for the second time, I am positively dumbfounded at how a young man born in Australia, then raised in England could create such a richly detailed account of some of the darker possibilities in rural American life. It's worn pages have been given a place of honor on my bookshelf next to Flannery O'Conner.