Chuck Palahniuk: Choke; Lullaby

By MARK BROATCH

The pungent, offbeat character of Palahniuk's ideas - remember Fight Club? - and the skill, energy and comedy in his storytelling make these new novels (Choke just out in paperback) enjoyable, thought-provoking romps through morasses of moral decay.

The cover quote from the Independent - "Choke is Fight Club for sex addicts" - doesn't do either book justice.

Victor Mancini, sex addict, works at an 18th-century theme park where the bored-to-death workers are either telling visiting schoolkids terrible historical lies, shagging in the hay or getting stoned.

To keep his mentally declining mother at an expensive private hospital, Mancini pretends to choke at restaurants - the theory being that the person who saves you will feel responsible for you and send you fat cheques ever after. As if.

Thankfully, Choke's less about getting steak stuck in your throat and more about having your fill of the bittersweet menu of humanity. Palahniuk's well of bile is always full; he is never short of a bucketful of the ills of capitalist society: the slow strangulation by introduced plants and animals, the legislated removal of risk from everyday life, fiction as an escape from society's laws, the choices we make daily for the old and against the young, so killing the future for the present in every litre of petrol or acre of rainforest. He puts a reasonable argument.

The liveliness and provocativeness of ideas is mirrored in his style: sharp, often verbless sentences, shopping lists of points, repetition, attention to visceral detail, the slightly ghoulish but seldom bad-intentioned humour.

Just as Fight Club offered its own expertise on victim support groups, explosives and so on, Choke provides medical detail literally ad nauseam. Lullaby is expert on antique furniture, sexual killers, Wicca, imported plants, animal cruelty.

But Lullaby's target is much larger: the information age.

Carl Streator is a reporter assigned to find out why a group of babies have died, apparently from SIDS.

It turns out each had been read a little poem, an ancient "culling song" intended to do away with the old and the infirm.

He partners with a real estate agent, Helen, who deals in haunted houses and whose own husband and child are apparent victims of the song.

They race round the country, with a young witch and a nihilist (he puts fake lawsuit notices in papers) in tow, destroying copies of the poem.

Streator rails endlessly against noise and information overload and the accompanying withering of imagination, musing about the impact of such a plague on the media-saturated world, for example, people paying for news "clean" of any harmful incantation.

Choke, Lullaby and Fight Club for that matter, are less about where we are now and more about how we got here.

Palahniuk is interested in turning a moral problem on its head, the ripple of contentious ideas and the process of their spread.

He likes to taste the ripe philosophical fruit we have planted in our modern world, even those he knows have already fallen to the damp ground and started to go bad.

* Random House $26.95; $34.95

* Mark Broatch is an Auckland reviewer.