A Fraction of The Whole by Steve Toltz Book Review and Philosophical Pontifications on Creating and Destroying
TLDR: You can either choose to create or destroy in this life…
I’m reading a brilliant multigenerational novel called A Fraction of the Whole by the Australian writer Steve Toltz. Its everything I want in a book: darkly funny and philosophical. Plus, Toltz has the voice of a modern-day Henry Miller. Sidenote: I love reading straight, white male writers. (Stay with me). As a mixed race bi-curious (still not quite aroused by the vag-but everything else, hubba hubba) Arab girl, reading straight white males offers a refreshingly diverse influence. Don’t get me wrong I love reading Arab/Muslim female voices but every time I do, I think things like, “Well! Nawaal El Saadawi has completely covered female genital mutilation. What nuance take shall I have?” (That joke I did about Essex girls being victims of it with the vajazzle was in hindsight in poor taste and explains why I no longer get booked south of the blackwater tunnel). Reading Nawal El Saadawi et al is great, but it does make it difficult to steal from them…
What? Oh, come on! Us artists, all ‘steal’! However, if you steal from someone who looks nothing like you, no one will be able to tell. This is why I got away with years of doing a very bad Stewart Lee impression on the open mic circuit and my straight white male comedian friends got annihilated for it. Reading A Fraction of the Whole, I felt myself doing the same. As I clawed through page after page of poetical turns of phrase, innovative descriptive style, existential yet unpretentious philosophical prose and funny and frank as fuck interiority, I got very excited about how Toltz male/Australian genius was going to eventually shine into my own Arab/female writing. Not all of it, just A FRACTION OF THE WHOLE. (Thank you). So, I was absorbing Toltz’s words like a sieve, I was mushing up his brain and filtering it into mine, extracting the juice; his pulp would stay with him. Creators, that’s my advice, strain through a sieve not a colander. Just take the juice and leave the pulp. You’re not a cheap tribute to your icon, you gotta make your own pulp.
The main theme in Toltz’s Booker prize shortlisted novel is the human need to create. What becomes evident is if you can’t find an outlet to create, you will only ever destroy. It got me thinking that a lot of bad behaviour is down to a lack of finding what you want to create in this life. As a child I was a destroyer, I was wildly naughty, to almost pathological levels. I toilet-papered the school toilets. I broke into classrooms and poured paint all over the carpets. I stole my sister’s school jumper and buried it at the bottom of the sports fields. (It was found two years later by a traumatised substitute P.E Teacher). In a much- loved comical family anecdote, I unscrewed all the felt tips pens in the art stationary cupboard, took out the little coloured ink sponges and swapped them all around. The result was hilarious, kids were so confused- painting purple trees and brown skies and red elephants. “Who’s done this?!” Mrs Dandekkerler cried. Cut to eleven-year-old me slyly, smirking like some sort of feminist remake of We Need to Talk About Kevin. “We need to talk about Zahra”, was actually a common phrase used by my headteacher when my mother answered our front door, “Oh Mr Speeling, what brings you to our neck of the woods?” Except we were living in Saudi Arabia so it was more like, “Oh, Mr Speeling what brings you to our compound of King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals?”.
“Your daughter’s a renegade,” Mr Speeling would shout, ‘A revolutionary, a rascal, a rebel, a rude, rambunctious reta…” because it was the nineties, and you could say all the r-words. Put it this way, I was so naughty, when I had my first epileptic seizure my parents thought I was ‘putting it on’. It took another seventeen other epileptic seizures and for me to pee on my mum’s rug for them to realise that there was something very wrong with me. They felt bad about this but not as bad as you might think, as it was the nineties. Parenting was completely lax. Not like it is now. Nowadays most parents would be scared they’ve caused irrecoverable damage that would only be slightly quelled by years of expensive therapy. Even though that is exactly what happened, my parents still feel guiltless, as not only are they nineties parents but Boomers through and through. They still don’t give a fuck and as my dad said to me the other day, in his thick Egyptian accent even after forty years of being a UK citizen, “Zahra, I don’t know why everyone your age goes to therapy and has ‘mental health’” (that’s what he calls mental health issues simply ‘having mental health’). “I have never had mental health or a therapist.” He told me before launching into his monologue about how he prefers living with his dog, Zeezoo to any of his ex-wives, “because Zeezoo, easier to control”.
You don’t need Jo Frost from Supernanny to tell you that the direct timeline of my destruction was in parallel with the destruction of my parent’s marriage. But also shit happens to every child in some way. You also don’t need Philip Larkin to tell you that your parents will always fuck you up in myriad forms. The reaction to the fucking up is often to destroy even more. But actually, the remedy is in the antithesis of the poison. It’s not an eye for an eye, it’s an eye for an ear. Peace comes from listening and going the other way. They go low you go high. They destroy, you create.
What Toltz emphasises is that people will continue to destroy if they have nothing to create. This is exemplified by the protagonist in A Fraction of the Whole who has no goal in life, i.e he has nothing to create, so instead he destroys. He is responsible for the destruction of his brother’s demise. He inadvertently through a series of very small and seemingly inconsequential actions causes his brother to lose the vessel which helps him create.
‘In order for the universe to teach excruciating lessons…the sportsman must lose his legs’
Once disabled, his brother too becomes a destroyer. Without being able to pursue his creativity, his sporting talent effectively disabled, his brother becomes the ultimate destroyer in the form of, erm, killing loads of people. In his defence he is killing all the people who are destroying the ethics of Australian Sport. Through this irony, this constant juxtaposition between creating and destroying, we see how Toltz has deftly thematised destruction throughout. That’s the very point of a literary theme, it gets repeated and repeated in different forms. A bit like families’ histories and traits getting repeated over time-which is another theme. All this destruction and creation of the family made me think of my own family and how I started life off as a destroyer before becoming a creator…
I stopped destroying stuff as soon as I found Drama Club. Thank goodness I discovered it because I probably would have joined some corrupt network and become an Anne Summers’ Rep or something, if I hadn’t. I was only goaded to audition for our Saudi Arabian school’s production of Oliver because Mohammed Mohammed Mohammed (was his actual name) had the audacity to say I would never get the part of Dodger because I was a girl. I told him I bloody well would, because they had given the part of Fagin, a seventy-five-year-old Eastend pickpocket mastermind to a fifteen-year-old boy called Fadi who was seventeenth in line to the Saudi throne. Plus, it’s called Acting, not Being you cretin. So, wanting to prove Mohammed Mohammed Mohammed wrong, that women can do anything a man can do (even though women still couldn’t drive or vote in Saudi at the time) I walked into the audition, imitated my Kilburn born Uncle Anthony who had been in prison for fraud and was rumoured to have known the Krays, and got the part. From then on there I was a creator not a destroyer.
Later when I was a teenager and back in the UK, I thought: Why would I destroy my body and brains with drugs and alcohol when I needed my body and brains to be able to do a shuffle ball change and recite the complete works of Shakespeare? No thank you. Why would I have sex in the school toilets like Courtney Cavendish did - (rumour has it Allen Dixon put it in the wrong hole, no, not that one, the rumour was he put it in her PEE HOLE). Why would I have underage sex in the toilets of my Aldershot state school with a pimply, greasy twirp when I could instead audition to play Lady Macbeth? And even though I lost out to my acting rival Rachel Crow I was pleased to find that it wasn’t because she was a better actress than me. I got the part of Banquo because our drama teacher said, I was “more believable as a man than Rachel”, which is the only time my upper lip hair has worked in my favour.
I was having a convo with some local friends the other day about Crime and Misdemeanours in the area. What struck me is that they had a distinct lack of empathy, and it seemed like they just wanted them to disappear to Australia or something, coincidentally where A Fraction of the Whole is set. They didn’t want to help them they just wanted to hide them. I told them its simply because they have nothing to create, so they can only destroy.
As you are all well aware the news is very depressing at the moment. And I’m watching CBBC Newsround, if you don’t know what that is, it’s a bit like Fox News in that its made accessible to people with the mental capacity of eight to ten years but without the right-wing agenda. There is destruction everywhere. They say in war times everyone’s fucking like rabbits because the human reaction from all the destruction is to counteract it by procreation. But can there be some sort of synthesis between the two concepts where people are creating destruction? Creating destruction? It might sound like an oxymoron, but the media create headlines to cause destruction.
My PhD thesis is all about how news outlets create sensationalist Islamophobic, racist, misogynist rhetoric which destroys lives. Fiction does the opposite. It has been proven to create empathy for people from different backgrounds. Where else are you going to side with a paedophile than in Lolita? Hated protagonists are needed in literature because somewhere deep down we actually care for people we hate. Anne Frank famously said that she still believes that people are really good at heart before her life was destroyed at a concentration camp. Maybe I am naïve but I think the same. Hate and destruction happens when people lose hope in their creativity. Look at Hitler with his art career. Despite all this destruction, we have to still keep creating. Art is the answer. Don’t abandon it like Hitler. Art is the antithesis of destruction. Keep creating out of the destruction whether it be art in the more traditional sense or harbouring communities or even just plain fucking and creating your own family. Take your broken destroyed heart and make it art, whatever art means to you. Finally, remember that Einstein said that energy cannot be created nor destroyed it can only be transferred. Everything we choose to do in this life gets passed down to the next generation. Destruction breeds destruction. So, we must keep creating.
