Life wasn’t linear, and if my book hoped to tell the truth it couldn’t be either… you start to lose a sense of where and when… it was a kind of possession.
The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas is quite a read, one so multi-layered as to defy attempts at categorisation from all angles, or any delimiting terms such as modernist, postmodern, metafiction, biography or gumshoe noir. Daniel James successfully manages to mix the last three or four of these with biography and a crash course in art and architectural history, literature and philosophy, whilst placing a fictionalised version of himself at dead centre: all in all, it’s no mean feat. I thought at first the relentless footnotes would put me off, as they often do with David Foster Wallace, but after a short time their effect was to provide further immersion in the world of The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas, implicating the reader thoroughly in the protagonist’s doomed venture and the dark mystery at the heart of it – at first you feel like you’re drowning in them, but before too long, it’s as if you need them in order to stay afloat. This is even true of the ostensibly irritating ones, the ones that tell you just where a European beer is from and exactly how it’s brewed, or how wild garlic is harvested in the Basque region of Spain for the purposes of local rustic cuisine, or even who Fluxus were. About three quarters of the way through The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas, James goes full-on postmodern with a two-page footnote explaining the purpose of all the (500+) footnotes. That’s me kind of sailing close to giving too much away, but as it’s nothing to do with the plot as such, I don’t consider this to be a spoiler.
The book’s structure is, on a basic level, a documentarian one, like the packages-as-chapters concept employed by Peter Carey in A True History of the Kelly Gang taken many steps further, and those ubiquitous footnotes only serve to embellish and reinforce this. The narrative sections are the chapters from James’s book-within-a-book, and these are broken up by transcripts of telephone conversations and podcasts, recorded notes made on a smartphone, letters from the authorities concerning the protocol of how you would go about declaring a person dead absent a body, magazine pieces, redactions, oral histories and more, all wrapped up in a classic private detective noir, one with the more than a slight air of otherness, of the supernatural – in many ways it felt a little like Alan Parker’s 1987 classic modern noir movie Angel Heart.
The ostensible plot is that the Daniel James of the novel is contracted by an anonymous agent to write a biography of the reclusive conceptual artist and synaesthetic savant Ezra Mass, who has disappeared, supposedly to prepare his final artwork. The agent offers James an incredible, unspecified amount of money: James is in considerable debt and his career’s on the skids, he’s described by some as a showman and a charlatan, by the anonymous friend providing the footnotes as a man who had always had a complicated relationship with the truth; but there’s more to his taking on the job than this. He’s fascinated, and quickly becomes enmeshed, obsessed, as his mind incrementally disintegrates. The job also pits him against the sinister Ezra Maas Foundation, as well as his army of lunatic fans – notoriously litigious, the Foundation have been expunging all information on Maas from the internet since his disappearance, leaving only their own website, www.ezramaas.com. This gave the novel a slight Blair Witch Project feel, in terms of viral marketing (the website’s very convincing), at least at first, and I was also reminded of Adam Nevill’s Last Days, wherein a washed-up indie filmmaker is employed to make a documentary on an international Mansonesque apocalypse cult from the 1970s, and to uncover whatever’s happened to its surviving members, But although I did enjoy Last Days, The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas is a far more accomplished novel, one that will keep you thinking of it between reading sessions, and for long afterwards too, and I’m afraid Last Days seems like pulp by comparison. As Daniel careers around Europe and the United States, meeting warning after warning, encountering horror after death after portent, and more and more disturbing pieces of information about Mass’s past and the origins of the Foundation, we are there with him every step of the way, holding his hand, telling him, no Dan, don’t look, take a step back, please, no more mate; can’t you see what going on here, knowing all the time that he can’t. Because he has to go on, he has no choice. He’s chasing, among other things, the last copy of an unnamed film Maas made, one with encoded mathematical messages that are said to drive the viewer insane and to have seizures – indeed, the first death he encounters, Jane, pleads with him via her diary/suicide note, don’t watch the film. Rarely have I felt so thoroughly involved with and hypnotised by a novel. Because this seems like more than just another book. It will not so much draw you in as drag you to its febrile core, shaking your bones to dust and robbing you of all sleep and peace of mind as you go. Really. I mean it. Five stars.
I received a copy of The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas from the author in exchange for a fair and honest review.
Mad Teddy read some books. 