Like the not-quite-documentary 20,000 Days on Earth, Nick Cave's latest offering is a complex and brilliant distillation of life and art that defies categorisation.
THE SICK BAG SONG
Nick Cave
Text Publishing
As its title proudly proclaims, The Sick Bag Song originated as a series of jottings made on airsickness bags during his 2014 tour of North America.
In it, Cave offers us an insight into his physical experiences and the dark workings of his mind; descriptions of life on the road which spin out into free association, fragment into song and transform memory or dream in a prose poem that perfectly captures the essence of life on the road.
By rights such a dissociative and narcissistic outpouring should be unreadable, yet for all its fragmentary nature it is as carefully crafted as any of his songs.
Divided into sections, one for each of the cities in which he performed, it is tied together by repeated themes and recurring characters: the nine essences of creativity, a girl poised upon the railing of a bridge, a boy on a railway track who becomes the man on the stage.
The familiar parade of sex, violence and death are of course there - decapitation is something of a leitmotif - but Cave also reflects upon his childhood, the artists who have inspired him and the parasitic nature of the creative process, presenting everything with a knowing wink to the reader, as if to say "this is all about me and we both know it''.
For every strutting pose he permits us a glimpse of the weary man dyeing his hair black in a hotel bathroom, overcome by relief when his socks return intact and in pairs from the drycleaners, or sitting in the dark listening to a phone ringing unanswered in his wife's room at home.
I read The Sick Bag Song in one sitting and felt as if I had been there with him the entire time, sharing the moments of exaltation and inspiration, weariness and homesick longing.
It haunts me as much as his music, and I can't wait to dive back into its depths again.
• Cushla McKinney is a Dunedin scientist.
WIN A COPY
The ODT has five copies of The Sick Bag Song, by Nick Cave, to give away courtesy of Text Publishing. For your chance to win a copy, email helen.speirs@odt.co.nz with your name and postal address in the body of the email, and ‘‘Nick Cave Book Competition'' in the subject line, by 5pm on Tuesday, March 22.
LAST WEEK'S WINNERS
Winners of last week's giveaway, Final Chapters: How Famous Authors Died, by Jim Bernhard, courtesy of Newsouth Books, were: Beverly Martens, Robin Gauld and Alex Wearing, all of Dunedin, May Ludemann, of Oamaru, and Sara Keen, of Tinwald.
