In Watermelon Sugar

Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar is very much a book of its time.  It’s a story set in a commune and was, unsurprisingly, written in the 1960s.  It’s an incredibly easy read, I think I finished off the entire thing in less than a day.  But a lot of that stems from the fact that each of the chapters is only around a page or two long, if that.  The book slips away through these miniature moments and events which only partially form a cohesive narrative.  It’s also completely addictive to read because of the length of the chapters.  Each one is a small hit of story, of events which may or may not be happening.

The main narrative, such as it is, is the story of an unnamed narrator living in a commune, iDEATH.  Our narrator is in the process of writing the first book to arrive in the commune for 35 years; it’s not really entirely clear at any point whether this is due to some kind of apocalyptic nightmare, or just the severe and intentional isolation of the community.  Anyway, our communees are happily living together with their casual attitudes to sex and sharing of the cooking responsibilities when along comes the ex-communicated inBOIL and his gang.  The commune knows that something is coming, and all of them apart from outsider Margaret are scared of what inBOIL is going to do.  He eventually shows up in iDEATH with his gang and violent intentions.  Death follows.  Not even iDEATH.

There are some brilliant parts to this book.  I don’t think I fully understand them, but they’re brilliant nonetheless.  Take, for example, the narrators parents.  They’re eaten by tigers when he is a child.  He isn’t particularly upset about this, tigers are predators and so the narrator feels that he can’t resent them for eating other animals.  Besides, they help him with his arithmetic.  They’re very cultured and might not really be tigers (consumption of human flesh aside).  As I said, it’s difficult to understand, and it sounds pretty ridiculous when I try and explain it.  The Sun too, in an entirely non-ridiculous way, changes colour daily and produces different coloured watermelons dependent on the day of the week they are sown and harvested. 

The whole iDEATH thing is kind of jarring too.  Braugitan was, of course, writing before the time that Apple took over a good portion of the world.  Apple’s subsequent domination of culture makes the whole thing feel like it should be a parody, or some kind of oblique satire about the cult of the iPhone.  And it’s not.  I’m not really sure why the commune is called iDEATH and I have no idea why it’s stylised as it is.  Granted, Steve Jobs was by all accounts a total hippy, so it’s very plausible that he read In Watermelon Sugar and thought the stylisation was just stellar. 

In Watermelon Sugar is a good read, all allusions to the Apple Empire aside.  There’s probably loads going on that I missed because I was reading it so quickly or because I know nothing about communes that I haven’t seen on Louis Theroux documentaries.  On the plus side, iDEATH is pretty benign in comparison to the ones Louis Theroux visits.  There’s not a paedophile or a religious fanatic in sight.  And I really love the bit about the tigers.

I’m now on The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe.