Have you explored your clingwrap fetish lately? How about your desire to wrap a minor dead celebrity with that roll in your kitchen cupboard? If you have not, let “
Ulrich Haarburste’s Novel of Roy Orbison in Clingfilm” regale you.
Like many successful bloggers, Haarbürste – a pseudonym for Michael Kelly – decided to turn the idea behind his blog into a book. His variation on a theme is really a variation on a scenario: the first-person character, Haarbürste, has an overwhelming urge to wrap Roy Orbison in saran-wrap, or, clingfilm. Orbison, a live and Germanized version of himself in the book, consents under varying degrees of pressure to being wrapped completely in clingfilm by Haarbürste, which makes Haarbürste feel “one with the godhead.”
The sensuous quality to Haarbürste’s desire is not lost in the silliness, and the longer one reads about him and his pet turtle Jetta, the more one feels compassion towards his inexplicable fetish. In one postcard story prefacing the novel, Orbison and Haarbürste are in outer space. “As the clingfilm unfurls in languid arc in the zero gravity and then girdles him gently as I spiral around him … Tears of wordless joy leak from my ducts and float off like little jewels, crystallized moment of ecstasy, tiny universes of rapture, perfect unto themselves. ‘You are completely wrapped in clingfilm, Captain.’”
In the novel, neurotic Haarbürste and his turtle Jetta help black-garbed, sunglass-clad Orbison solve problems and fight Mexican bandits in Düsseldorf.
Part of the joy, and almost all the humour, comes from Haarbürste’s characters’ supra-polite and yet irrationally systematic behaviour stereotypically associated with Germans. The author’s ‘Germanification’ of English – a style which borrows German phrases and has a halting rhythm – allows the characters to be rigid and courtly. Roy’s response to Haarbürste’s recurring request to wrap him in clingfilm is always some variation of the following: “I see no reason to object. Commence to wrap me in clingfilm at once.”
The attempt to wrap Roy in clingfilm is always full of anxiety for Haarbürste, and the addition of evil-doers adds an extra degree of angst. The evil-doers are clownish and, like most cartoonish villains, overconfident.
“I began in the ordinary way, with littering and queue-barging,” explains one criminal to another. “I logically proceeded to murder and tax-evasion … I now take a positive delight in flouting the social conventions. I leave my shoe-laces untied, I do not comb my hair, and I am cavalier with the use of Umlauts.”
One criminal says that he crosses against the traffic light “for the sheer metaphysical evil of it.”
The melodrama and slapstick are highly amusing and kept me reading despite the frequent chapter breaks. The absurdity was the book’s biggest charm. The central turning point of the book comes when Roy reguses to be wrapped in clingfilm anymore, plunging Haarbürste into a suicidal melancholy. At this point I realized my attachment to the stubborn Haarbürste and my heart ached as his turtle Jetta watched him experiment with ways of killing himself that would not cause inconvenience to other people once he was dead. He was ready to tie himself up in a burlap bag for trash collection but he realized that if he killed himself with a knife, the trash collectors might cut their hands on it.
In an interview on his website, Kelly keeps up his serious veneer. When asked how many people see his stories as humorous, he replies, “I am not aware of anyone seeing it as humour … if people laugh that is nice, but I do not think my fans would class me as a humorist in the way that you would, say, Dan Brown.”
He explains the reason he chose Roy Orbison was that he was intrigued by his “mysterious and enigmatic quality.” He explains that clingfilm has always fascinated him since he was a child because “it is supple and sensuous, clinging and yet transparent.”
While admitting to not actually having met Roy Orbison, Kelly reiterates his hope:
“Only last week I was washing some dishes and I thought, 'What if Roy Orbison was forced to wash some dishes? There would be a danger of his clothes being splashed. What could be more logical than to wrap him in clingfilm to prevent this?' So it goes.”
My only critique? The book should come wrapped in clingfilm.
.Labels: ulrich haarburste's novel of roy orbison in clingfilm
]
