Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By William Lane, Transit Lounge, $29.99.
Remuneration, of more than the financial kind, is the return you’ll get with Lane’s intriguing new novel. It shows language and life do go hand-in-hand. Albeit, in an unconventional way.
It’s an inspired send-up on the way we use verbal communication to describe our lives. It takes risks, but in the delivery it dramatises ideas of language, advertising and consumerism in an unusual style.
The Word intensely satirises the ways. Through oddball advertising eccentric named Kenric, Lane gives voice and sanity to the case of him always disliking advertising.
In the prologue, Janis says to her husband Kenric: “you’re always so finicky with words. That’s my job,” Kenric replies. Therein lies the crux of this story.
Kenric is an oddball advertising eccentric who possesses an unusual gift for language. The brands he names, sell. Yet he comes to believe advertising uses language too cynically.
Not everyone likes advertising, but who can avoid it. Kenric could not evade the issue and its role in our consumerist society. Think of all the programs it disrupts on television.
Writing this story took Lane a long time. “The way forward appeared a few years ago when I realised the story could address not only language in advertising, but language more broadly – language in all discourse, public and private. Suddenly the character Kenric began to grow, to not only critique language in advertising, but language in general.”
The sentiments expressed see The Word, ‘not only rejecting the language of advertising, but the materialism and consumerism that feed, and depend on, advertising’.
Lane draws, in part, on personal experience in his depictions.
“In writing The Word, I was trying to address questions that had long nagged me. The play of ideas is central to the novel. This may not be obvious at first, however, as the ideas are contained in humour, characterisation and incident. In this way, The Word is a Trojan horse. But perhaps all novels are.”
You could one of two copies of The Word, if you correctly tell us who is the ‘oddball advertising eccentric’. Entries should be sent to [email protected] by next Monday, 19 November 2018. Names of the winners will be announced in Frank Cassidy’s PS-sssst…! column next week.
