In Eugene’s Marten’s masterful novel Firework, protagonist Jelonnek has a game of football on tape which he replays over and over. An important game, the game, where star quarterback known only as Number Nineteen has the opportunity to become immortalised. Only the violence of the sport imposed itself, Nineteen’s body was broken, leaving Jelonnek with only the tape and its power to return to a moment when everything was still possible. “Number Nineteen would not join them in the afterlife of overtime, would not return to the game,” Eugene Marten writes. “There was no end now, no clock, only the static and snow of what might be. The past is never complete. You rewind it while you get another beer, then start over.”
In his latest novel, Pure Life, Eugene Marten takes us beyond Jelonnek’s tape into the life of Number Nineteen himself. First with an extended prologue which condenses the slow rise and swift fall of an athlete on the cusp of glory into less than fifty pages, then through the aftermath that now represents his life. Like a veteran returned home with no way to communicate what has been taken from him, Nineteen is a man crippled—physically, mentally, spiritually—by the very thing which gave him purpose, losing his fame and family with equally undignified haste. His too-often battered head loses chunks of time to blackness, yet is somehow entirely submerged in the past. As though there exists a threshold inside of a man, be it of triumph, pain or brotherhood, beyond which there are only degrees of mourning.
Alarmed by his deteriorating health, Nineteen heads to the Mosquito Coast of Honduras for non-FDA-approved treatment, a Hail Mary throw which might make him whole again. But as with so many promised miracles, there’s no substance behind the dream, just an empty vacuum which quickly sucks Nineteen toward the brutal truths of existence. There is no rewinding now.
What follows is a journey into the rainforest to rival Heart of Darkness or Paul Bowles’s ‘Distant Episode’, a nightmare told from a curdled concoction of colonialism, capitalism and masculinity that readers familiar with Marten’s work will have been half-expecting all along. But as with his previous novels, Marten is too astute to let any sense of commentary overshadow the immediacy of the writing, foregoing easy moralising in favour rhythm and feel. The essence of Pure Life lies within this reptilian drive of the prose. Because for better or worse, the journey allows Nineteen to rediscover what it means to feel alive in the purest sense. Pure life is the athlete in motion, is violence, is the heat and noise of the jungle itself.
Pure Life is out now via Strange Light.