They were playing a get-to-know-you game.
“Marry, bang, kill: a tree, the word free, the number three.”
She responded almost before he was finished with the last vowel.
I loved Andrew Battershill's first novel, Pillow – its surrealistic violence, evocative metaphors, and engaging language – and was delighted to see that he had written another book; was delighted that it was apparently another violent crime story. But while Marry, Bang, Kill does revisit the same sort of criminal underworld as Battershill's first effort, it does so in much more straightforward language. I appreciate that Pillow probably appealed to a very niche audience, appreciate that Battershill was probably trying to find a wider audience with this book, but my own tastes lie within the niche and this read seemed fairly ordinary to me. I'd still happily pick up anything Battershill comes out with next.
As Marry, Bang, Kill begins, we meet Tommy Marlo: a mugger with a conscience; someone who relieves people of their laptops with a hunting knife held to their throats, but also someone who needs to take off his strong prescription glasses first so he can't see his victims' faces and their fear. When Tommy discovers that the latest laptop he has jacked belongs to the leader of the country's most violent motorcycle gang, he eventually decides to leave Vancouver and hide out on one of the nearby Gulf Islands. Perspective shifts between five main characters' points-of-view, and as their stories intersect, there's an inevitability to how the plot unfolds; as though everyone's fates were sealed the moment Tommy chose this one laptop to steal. This feeling of inevitability – of not quite being in control of one's own fate – is repeated throughout the story, starting with Tommy's own thoughts:
Tommy didn't know exactly how making a life-changing decision felt. Like everyone else, Tommy had made such decisions every second he'd been awake as an adult. Like everyone else, Tommy's life was nothing more than a careless, arbitrary stream of mortal micro-choices. Regardless, Tommy would afterwards remember ripping off the club not as a choice at all but rather as a series of stunning realizations, a short, slick conveyor belt of epiphany.Greta is a stone cold hitman that the bikers send after Tommy:
If she needed someone dead, she killed them. Ever since Karen had showed her the ropes and referred her to Sergei and she'd shot that defenceless teen who'd ratted to the cops, Greta had stopped knowing or caring about struggle. There was no struggle, just different stages of a plan, spiderwebs of coincidence branching off life's neat flow chart.Glass Jar is Quadra Island's local meth cook, smalltime criminal, and loose associate of the gang:
He did it in the same way he did many things, thoughtlessly and fully assured, something unspoken and unspeakable pulling his head along, the rest of him only following. If at the end of the trip he'd ended up helping her take out the garbage and making best friends, or killed her and stolen her jewellery and microwave, he would have felt equally that it wasn't what he'd been planning to do.Mike is a rookie RCMP member, wanting to make a name for himself on this small spit of rainforest where nothing much happens:
Mike drove home barefoot but proud of himself, proud of the chances he was starting to take, the things he was starting to realize. He was giving in to the fluidity of the situation, and he was doing all he could: taking away a little bit of ground at a time.But while all of these characters seem to be drifting towards their destinies, Mousey is a retired (dirty) Chicago detective whose life experience gives him a larger perspective; he can see (and set) the chess pieces in motion:
Mousey enjoyed the familiar, cracky-paranoid buzz of thinking, of focusing wholly on just the facts that came from short, terrifying seconds, the facts that came from quick decisions that nobody really felt they'd made.Late in the story, Tommy realises, “Most of the things that had ever happened to, or near, or because of him had been, at least at some point, pure coincidences.” To get to this point, Battershill moves an engaging plot through interesting intersections – no “coincidence” felt like a cheat – and along the way, there are some dark laughs and some lovely nature writing about Quadra Island; I was never bored. If I thought that Pillow had a Pulp Fiction vibe, Marry, Bang, Kill is more Get Shorty: a good story, but not extraordinary.
