The Second Coming

Having enjoyed Kill Your Friends, I continued on the John Niven trail, purchasing another two of his novels. First up was The Second Coming, published in 2011 and serving as a kind of bridge to Kill 'Em All, the sequel to Kill Your Friends. It mirrors Kill Your Friends' satirical take on modern society, but turns its eye particularly to religion, earning it a good deal more controversy and detractors - although not always for the right reasons.

The premise is straightforward enough - having created the world and everything in it, God keeps an eye on things up until the Renaissance and decides that mankind is doing well enough that He can afford a week's holiday. Returning from His fishing trip - which takes more like 300 years in Earth time - He's dismayed to see the state of the world, with all its wars, pollution, inequality and injustice. And worst of all are all the Christians - none of whom seem to be following His original, single ideal any more: "be nice". So He decides it's time to send His son and messenger back down to Earth for a bit to try and spread the word and just get people to be nicer to each other.

Enter Jesus, the book's main character, who hasn't been up to much since his last trip down here - and he's reluctant to return, after the treatment he got. But eventually he agrees to give it a try, and after being implanted into a virgin in rural America (God likes to do things by the book) he grows up to be a down-and-out musician in New York, helping recovering addicts and the homeless. But he feels that he needs a bigger platform to get his message out there, and by chance - or was it meant to be? - he sees that entering a TV talent show could be the key. It was at this point - having torn through the first third of the book, laughing out loud at regular intervals at its wittiness and inventiveness in depicting heaven and hell - that The Second Coming lost its way a bit for me. Because before the contest itself, we're forced to sit through a road trip across The States, meant to serve as character development for Jesus and his disciples but ultimately failing because none of them, save Jesus himself, had much character to develop in the first place. There's his bandmates Kris and Morgan, respectively the angel and demon on his shoulder, recovering addict Becky who I believe represents the Mary Magdalene figure, Vietnam veteran Bob whose vocabulary has been reduced to a single word thanks to PTSD: there's nothing particularly original to be found, and their trip drags on without really adding anything.

Anyway, I bought this book with the promise of more Steven Stelfox, and fortunately he swoops in around the halfway point to salvage things. He's moved on a lot since the events of Kill Your Friends, now working in LA as the brains behind, and face of, American Pop Star - having become a very thinly-veiled caricature of Simon Cowell and doing very well at it. This leads to some of the more memorable passages as Jesus and Steven clash over Jesus's musical direction (Jesus favours organic indie music, Stelfox knows that that won't sell many records) and the general public start to consider that maybe this scruffy-looking chap claiming to be the legitimate son of God isn't as mad as he first seems. It probably says a lot about me that I liked Steven much more as a character than Jesus - or maybe it's just down to how Niven writes him in such a cleverly multifaceted way, creating a man who is, in theory, pure evil but who you can't help but respect just a little bit. Certainly, I felt as though, were Stelfox to come face to face with the Devil as depicted in this book, he'd stand a pretty good chance of talking his way out of hell.

And so Jesus gets his moment in the spotlight, and it's all he needs to gain a legitimate following, whereupon he moves to Texas to set up a commune. And so I started to lose my enthusiasm for the novel again, somehow caring less about the attempts of local religious figures and then the government to sabotage the potential utopia that Jesus is trying to create, the satirical points that Niven is making here feeling just a bit too obvious and unoriginal. He saves things again with the conclusion and an ending that was actually a lot less cynical than I was expecting, but the ultimate result is a flawed book that I felt missed a lot of potential. And that's without getting into the issues I had with its timeline - it's made clear that God has the power to play around with that kind of thing, but still - and Niven's use of language. I've never had an issue with profanity in a book before but it's so overdone and overused here that it does detract from the prose a lot.

The Second Coming does a lot right, and makes a lot of good points, but there are just a few too many issues for it to be a truly great book. That being said, the world would benefit a lot if everyone would follow Jesus's advice and "be nice" more often.

3/5

Jesus's audition song, and not a bad choice at all.

Kill Your Friends

The variety goes on. This time I jumped to a book that was different even by my standards - the 2008 debut by Scottish author John Niven, Kill Your Friends. The novel caused quite a stir on release due to its graphic depictions of the music industry in the 1990s and its study of power and obsession - and I was pleased to find that its reputation was well deserved.

As the novel opens, it seems that our 27-year-old protagonist Steven Stelfox - one of those characters you should by rights hate, thanks to his casual, ingrained sexism, racism and bloody-minded attitude, but at the same time end up loving due to his charm, ability to rattle off memorable one liners and ultimately admirable ambition - is pretty on top of things. He has a hugely overpaid job developing artists for a record label, an office to himself and a nice pad in Notting Hill. But Steven wants more - he won't be happy, in fact, until he reaches the very top of his game. And he knows that to do so will involve driving all of his rivals out. Kill Your Friends details Steven's journey through 1997 as he goes to ever more extreme lengths to make sure this happens - even extortion and murder aren't off the cards.

Look up basically any review of this book and the writer will quickly turn to comparisons with Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho. And this review is no exception, because the similarities are obvious - the protagonist's internal monologue throwing an aggressive eye over his surroundings, the business meetings where everyone acts nice but are really out to destroy each other, and the prevailing satirical commentary on how we have created a society where psychopathy is just about the only way to make it to the top. But Niven does approach it all from a much more British - or perhaps English - angle: his character's seething disdain for the working class, for example, coming more from a point of institutionalised elitism rather than capitalist insularity. Likewise the violence is dialled down hugely in comparison: while American Psycho positively revels in it, Kill Your Friends drops in just a couple of scenes where necessary, just to remind us not to get too attracted to Stelfox's life choices.

And while we're talking about Brett Easton Ellis, I personally found a lot of parallels with his other famous work, Less Than Zero. Because Steven Stelfox ultimately sits somewhere between Patrick Bateman and Clay - while on the outside he may be a confident, ruthless young man, he freely admits that he's never really in control of his career or life, it only taking one bad signing or risky decision gone bad to end a career. And then there's the endless whirl of drink, drugs and partying that can only ever take its toll on a young mind, becoming less and less fun yet somehow more and more necessary and, just like in Less Than Zero, leading nowhere good for the purposeless young people who choose this lifestyle. Most sobering of all is that Steven actually does manage to break out of this cycle, realising that to rest on your laurels is to admit defeat and taking his plotting to the next level.

It all sounds very dark. But Kill Your Friends, on balance, is more of a comedy - albeit a very black and satirical one. It's an irreverent look at British society and culture, and a reminder of just how odd things were back then - we elected a Labour Prime Minister who spent millions on travel and entertainment in his first year in office while simultaneously cutting social benefits (a strategy that makes him a "top lad" in Steven's book), experienced a very un-British public outpouring of emotion following the death of Princess Diana, the two biggest songs of the year were a twenty-five year old Elton John track and the Teletubbies theme tune, Radiohead came out with an album that everyone hated but is now considered one of the best of all time, and Oasis came out with an album that everyone loved but is now considered pretty poor. And the final message is clear enough - deep down, all we really want is to make a bit of cash.

Kill Your Friends got me into Niven in a big way - enough to acquire its sequel and another of his novels, which will be the next two things I read.

4.5/5

And for the record, Be Here Now is nowhere near as bad as people say it is.