A darkly comic tale of madness, trust, friendship and gardening.
Eric Yoshiaki Dando
ISBN: 0140256156
Trade paperback, 234pp
RRP: $14.95
Pub Date: April 1996
“We were dickheads in the eighties. We thought we were special. We wore black. We vandalised William Blake and churned out volumes of extremely flammable tennage-angst poetry. Anything could set it off: cheap politiecs, our parents, six island coolers and a girl who didn’t love you.”
It’s 1990 now, and snail malone’s live is about to take a backflip, his girlfriend thinks she’s a witch; his best friend howie is turning into an environmentalist facist and thinks he’s jesus – and the only work snail can find is washing dishes in a tacky hamburger restaurant. Escape comes in the form of dope and acid, friendship, crummy tv shows, and coaxing plants to take root in a concrete backyard.
Gradually, snail realises howie has lost his grip on reality, and that everything both friends have taken for granted is going to change.

at least, that’s how the write-up and back cover goes – and it doesn’t do it justice at all.

this book seems to be out of print. i’m letting you know that in advance, but i just can’t stop myself writing about it. i managed to get a copy of this book while i was going through university. at the time, i was writing deeply twisted and experimental writing which possessed as many odd words as i could find in a thesaurus, and on meeting up with my fellow *ahem* writers at uni, i realised i wasn’t the only one. then i found this book, tucked away in a bookshop, and the cover appealed and i opened up and saw it was written in fragments – a style i was toying with at the time.

impressed to see a book made of episodic fragments, i bought it, read it, and oohed it.

snail changed my outlook on words. previous to this, i often kept a thesaurus handy. eric dando taught me, through his book, that a thesaurus is a remarkably arrogant and childish thing which should definitely not be used when writing good prose. he uses a simple prose style which is deceptive in that such simple words conveyed such complex issues, emotions, and scenes. i was totally changed after reading this book, and consider it to be the one which changed my outlook on how i write. everyone finds a book like that, but not all of us have one which is criminally out of print and so hard to find.

mister dando has since written another book, oink oink oink, and it’s a remarkable book of its own and one i will no doubt discuss later, but for me, snail was a lightswitch going on in my head with a snap and a vigor i can’t begin to describe. he gave his prose a gentle, and riverlike style which is punchy, and sharp as much as it is loose and fluid. streamlined, maybe, is the word i’m looking for. it’s softly surreal and dreamlike in many ways – a quality i have enjoyed in the more complicated writing of haruki murakami.

the episodic nature of snail was perfect. it’s hard to believe it’s just another australian roomies story. we have so many of them, including the more unreasonably popular birmingham novels, but for me, snail is the epitome. it’s the one which really should have defined this little genre. the characters within possessed the right level of lunacy and the quirky nature of the prose really functioned well despite it being considered a little unconventional. at the time, i was writing my first creepy and hatboy novel with my friend and sparring partner, andrew “hatboy” hindle (the book was supposed to be a collaborative effort, but my version raged out of control. his version – i’m still unsure if it’s complete, but it tells the same story from hatboy’s perspective, and thus turns creepy into the bumbling fool rather than the other way round), and we were using the fragment process as a way of flipping a coin from perspective to prspective of our major characters, so when i saw how easy it would be to just sew the episodes into a single book, i was most impressed. even more so, because dando’s book inspired me to streamline my prose and thus create something a little more focussed than i think it would have been without it.

his method also allows a sense of poetry to filter into the book, so subtle that you’re often unaware that each perfectly constructed fragment is also a piece of poetry in its own right. the tempo of the words, the perfect beat of the sentence – all hold you breathless until the end.

the humour of the work is simply the most amazing element of the whole thing. dando’s easy humour is something i think many writers would be jealous of. there’s no sense at any time during the novel that he’s pushing the envelope, or trying hard to please. he just lets it flow out in an organic way which keeps you amused and even makes you laugh out loud. it is, in my opinion, second only to the hitch hiker’s guide the galaxy as the world’s most consitently funniest novel i’ve ever read. the contrast, then, with the serious elements of the book is made more powerful when delivered in this simplistic, dry amusement style. it’s as close to perfect as i can imagine.

i have had to lend my book a few times and i wish i could buy this book for many more of my friends (i have ceased to loan it as i am too afraid of not getting it back), and i would encourage you all to do a good crawl through secondhand bookshops in order to find this one. it’s so well worth having.

i’d like to quote the very first fragment of the book, if i may, just to show you what i’m talking about. the whole novel, in a way, is summed by this intriguing opener, and when i first opened the book, it’s what i read first and was the reason i bought it.

weevils
weevils get into the sugar. once you have weevils in the sugar there is no escape. they spread through the weetbix to the flour and then you are truly done for; they will not rest until they have infected your life, eaten your soul.
have you seen alien? that thing that comes out of their stomach? that was from weevils in the sugar. kennedy was shot by a weevil.

eric dando’s webpage can be found here.

or, check out his facebook link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/eric-dando-snail/88867051740 and show your driven need to read this absolute must-read book.