Torture/Porn

[utilitymonstergirl]

If my Saladin is childhood’s fear, the unknowable evil in the closet’s depths, I have become adulthood’s fear, fear of power, law, illustrious contacts, police resources, covert agencies, and sweet judicial murder.

 

—Ada Palmer, The Will to Battle

Porpentine's novel Serious Weakness is hard to summarize without making it sound softer or darker than it is. It brims with love for everyone shut out from the world of power and capital and neurotypical etiquette. Its near-future world is defined by vacuous trash and escalating environmental ruin. It follows Insul, a school-shooter-turned-art-vandal, grooming and torturing Trianon, an art restorer barely hanging on to that world of normalcy. It’s about trading an icy, impersonal Hell for one built on perverse devotion.

What makes this balance work is the story’s total disinterest in cheap shock. The scope of its atrocities can’t be conveyed in cherry-picked lines - it’s their steady accumulation, and though they may be grimly funny in the moment their impact lingers through everything that follows. Each new low point gave me the same feeling as the ending of The Traitor Baru Cormorant: pitilessly dark, but anything less would’ve been unacceptably pulling punches.

The same goes for its language and characterization. The pervasive use of “faggot,” “autist,” and “retard” isn’t proudly reclamatory or pointlessly edgy. It’s an honest expression of how the world sees these characters, stripped of all its bien-pensant word games. And although everyone we see is some stripe of pathetic and/or repugnant, the book reserves its rage for the system that shut them out of anything better. As monstrous as Insul is, nobody in a position to stop him looks twice at one bit of human trash brutalizing another.

Trianon is bleeding out in the bear trap of arrested development. He needs his girlfriend’s connections to have any chance of navigating adulthood’s cursus honorum. For all that Insul tyrannizes him, he’s presumed to still be a competent adult who can hold his own. Insul is no better - he has made himself a permanent enemy of the world of power, but can’t muster any rebellion beyond pointless violence and vandalism.

Yet it feels wrong to describe the two so stiffly, as a clueless counselor might. The lifeblood of Serious Weakness is its Porpentinian style - its grotesque squelching, its bleary soulless locales, its refusal to let you draw any easy conclusions. By all means consider how the world molded Insul and Trianon into these forms, but we must also simply sit with them and bear witness. After all, clueless love is hardly better than clueless cruelty.