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About one-third of the way into Nick Cave's Southern Gothic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989), the false prophet Abie Poe leads a congregation of three hundred souls in a blackly comic parody of baptism. Urged on through a downpour, the maddened throng fetches up at a “cloacal sump” of sewage-polluted swampland, into which the mad evangelist bids them plunge and be purified. Trapped in the crush against his will, wedged behind an old woman in her wheelchair, is a mute boy of thirteen named Euchrid Eucrow—the novel's antihero. His desperate solution is to release the chair's safety brake and slip free of the mob just as the pressure of all those bodies sends the sour old biddy tumbling head first into the muck.

Then, like the legion of unclean spirits that Jesus bid enter the swine, the squealing herd went the way of the wheelchair . . . And while the surging, floundering, flailing stack-up of semi-naked bedlamites thrashed in the shallows, ah . . . noticed the cripple's upturned feet . . . protruding quietly from the bubbling waters between the sinister wheels – two peaceable mud-monsters calmly observing the madness about them.

The woman is eventually pulled out, alive. Euchrid is spotted hiding in the rushes and hauled before the preacher, who affects to exorcise the “dumb spirit” possessing the boy. Euchrid feels a violent squirming in his chest; he seems on the verge of speech, but manages only to hawk a gob of phlegm at the man. The anti-miracle is complete.

Not long after, Poe loses his followers—though not before leading them in a horrific act of violence against a local harlot, Cosey Mo, in which many of her johns hypocritically take part. He becomes a drunken scarecrow haunting a derelict church, sermonizing to the rats; a failed paragon of the kind of gnostic spirituality that Harold Bloom termed “the American Religion.” Grace may be free, but holiness costs, remarked Flannery O'Connor. Cave, her literary descendant, reminds us that heresy does, too.

Cave is an Australian rock star and multi-hyphenate artist, the longtime leader of a band called the Bad Seeds, and famously the man behind “Red Right Hand,” Peaky Blinders' doomy theme song. (The title comes from Milton.) During Cave's teenage years, his father, a novelist manqué, used to declaim whole pages of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky to him; later, while living in West Berlin, Cave set out to write a novel of his own. He had recently relocated from London with his first band, the Birthday Party, a post-punk outfit known for its Southern Gothic sensibility and violent live shows. Soon after, the band imploded. Word-drunk as Joyce, for three years Cave shut himself up in a room in the impoverished district of Kreuzberg and wrote. The result was And the Ass Saw the Angel, one of the most astonishing literary performances of the past forty years. It is an untrammeled, Boschian vision of sin and ersatz salvation, the rewilding of a distinctly American genre in a more extreme and weirdly luxuriant form.

The action takes place in an isolated valley in the American South, settled by a Baptist splinter sect during the Civil War. Led initially by a self-professed prophet, Jonas Ukulore, and his business-savvy brother, Joseph, the militant “Ukulites” prosper for decades. Their business is sugarcane. Things turn ugly in 1941, however, when a cataclysmic storm gives rise to three years of ceaseless rain, desolating the valley and demoralizing its people. No attempt at propitiation avails. “To the townsfolk, God seemed as a mule who would not budge”—and in their despond they grow vile and apathetic. A host of sins spring up in a valley where nothing else can grow. Cave depicts all of this with gusto, alternating between grimness, ebullience, and pathos as he charts the community's decline.

On the margins of this imbroglio is Euchrid, poor white trash and the lone surviving son of two wretches, who live in a shack beside a junk heap. Euchrid's obese, bibulous mother is a terrifying presence, all muck and obscenity, like something from a Camille Paglia fever dream of chthonian womanhood. A “piss-eyed hell-bag with a taste for the homebrew,” she distills a moonshine called White Jesus, which is as close to the sacred as she gets. Euchrid's father, the one literate member of a still more monstrous clan of incestuous hill folk, is “capable of reciting great slabs of scripture by heart,” which inhibits neither his cruelty nor his malice. His chief preoccupation is pitting wounded animals against each other in melees to the death.

In the 2014 documentary 20,000 Days on Earth, Cave says of his imaginative milieu, “It's an absurd, crazy, violent world where people rage away and God actually exists.” Rage they do, for the existence of God implies his obverse. The lonesome cannibal Toad Morton, driven out by his kin (one of whom is Euchrid's pa), has no “friend or companion save the league of demons that rubbed and itched amongst the crags and sunless cracks of his bad, mad and unholy brain.” I have seen Cave onstage, raging away as if possessed, growling and roaring the murder ballad “Stagger Lee”—an enthralling, frightening performance. “Dirtiness is next to anti-Godliness” was the tagline for a Birthday Party single years before it showed up as a slogan in the mouth of preacher Abie Poe. All his characters, Cave went on, are “just crooked versions of myself.”

Euchrid grows up lonely and miserable but keenly alert. From busy red ants to hobos roasting a dog for dinner, no event is too small or stomach-churning to draw his penetrating gaze. A self-professed “Voyeur to the Lord,” mute Euchrid peeps in windows, eavesdrops from crawl spaces. “By divine appointment ah was God's snitch.” (He can speak to no one else.) Horribly abused and ostracized by the townsfolk, he collects his shed scabs and bloody bandages as evidence of his own existence. His inner monologue, with its biblical cadences and arcane vocabulary (“subfusc,” “pinguid,” “versant,” “uggr”), structures much of the story.

Euchrid's obsessions afford moments of startling beauty. See him marvel at the intricacies of an intact cicada shell: “[Ah] pored over the wing's tessellated arterial skeleton, and mused upon the myriad bifurcations and forks, the branches and anabranches revealed against the murky light.” For him, the years of malediction—each day lived in dim twilight under the punitive deluge—are “a time of eudemonia,” when, set beside universal suffering, his private pains feel less acute.

“As a child I believed that to use the imagination was wicked,” Cave has written:

I saw my imagination as a dark room with a large bolted door that housed all manner of shameful fantasies. I could almost hear my secret thoughts bumping and scratching behind the door, begging in whispers to be let out, to be told. Back then, I had no idea that those dark mutterings were coming from God.

Euchrid, too, hears all manner of mutterings echoing in the undercroft of his base-born brain. He is vexed by visions, especially of a consoling angel modeled on the prostitute Cosey Mo. Above his “head-din” there rises eventually what he believes is the cool, clear voice of God. He comes to believe in his own special election—that he, Euchrid, is hated for his name’s sake. And he hates his persecutors in turn.

Even after the baleful years of rain pass and prosperity returns, life at the bottom in Ukulore Valley persists in profound degradation. Older now but no less outcast, scrawny Euchrid spends countless hours in a little swampland hideaway lined with shoeboxes holding his bizarre collection of detritus, including the exhumed bones of his infant twin. Nearby, a pair of hobos doss down in the ruined Unitarian church that once served the itinerant cane workers:

The smell of death wafted from the font, in which a bloated rat floated on its side in two inches of scum. Blowflies swarmed the pews, their buzzing big in the hollow house. Only the terrible Christ remained undesecrated, nailed to its ebony gesture and hanging high, high above the reach of any unholy hand.

Euchrid isn't so lucky. Indignity is heaped on injustice; and in a narrative replete with Christs false and true, this “chosen soldier of the Lord” spirals into madness and comes to identify himself with the Messiah. His “crucified flesh” is scored with self-inflicted wounds to rival those of any flagellator. He dreams himself crucified on Calvary, facing a crowd of thorn-crowned imposters who contest his position on the cross. “Too many Christs,” thinks Euchrid in a panic, “and not enough crosses.” He cries out his claim to crucifixion—articulate for once—and the fake messiahs flee.

Late in the novel, after his swampland refuge is trashed, Euchrid turns the junk heap into a walled compound—the kingdom of Doghead. From a turret he surveys with a telescope the whole sweep of the valley, fixating on Beth, the lovely orphaned daughter of Cosey Mo, whose advent the Ukulites believe stopped the rain—a signal of God's renewed favor. The sect's women fuss over and venerate the child; ultimately, they prepare her to serve as a latter-day Virgin Mother. Through her own innocence and a series of misunderstandings, Beth comes to mistake long-haired, wound-bearing Euchrid for the man of sorrows she has been told will “come upon” her so that she might bear a child of promise. Her misprision has fatal consequences; and by the novel's end, the “merciless rain” returns, the Ukulite believers evidently heretics in the hands of an angry God.

Style, said Flaubert, is an absolute manner of seeing things. Cave's is a style of high catastrophe and low comedy (of the darkest sort), presenting us a picture of nature and humanity as razorous as that of Ted Hughes. Its superabundance of grotesque detail amazes, appalls, and chastens as does The Garden of Earthly Delights. What does it mean that Euchrid, though demented, is a sympathetic figure; and that his life, though not at all saintly, has the severity and deprivation of a saint's? In a 1996 essay about his relationship to Christianity, “The Flesh Made Word,” Cave identifies Christ not only with love but with the imagination, “at times terrible, irrational, incendiary, and beautiful.” For Cave, “Euchrid is Jesus struck dumb, he is the blocked artist, he is internalized imagination become madness.”

I would go further. Euchrid huffs that “eschatological deliberations are a grievous waste of time,” but it is on a clash of eschatological doctrines that the novel's climax turns. In the end, Euchrid fits the Ukulites' expectations as a key fits a lock, but the consummation is hardly one to be wished, devoutly or otherwise. The solitude of a Desert Father, the penury of a Francis of Assisi, the silence of a Carthusian are perhaps the accidents and not the substance of sainthood. Not every “blessed virgin” can be the Theotokos.

It turns out that fanatical devotion—the muck, the wounds, the silence, the commitment unto death—is easier than rigorous examination of self and society, easier than consistently intending one's mind without the aid of illusory support. Today, as cults and causes proliferate, scantly filling the void left by the retreat of transcendence, such fanaticism can be had cheaply. Extreme devoutness may be a prerequisite for holiness, as piety for sanctity, but should not be mistaken for it. Our mental maps of reality, our delusions and disordered dogmas, Cave dares to suggest, really matter. How you see the world will likely determine how you leave it.

Brian Patrick Eha is a widely published essayist and journalist. He writes from New York.

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