Sharp Teeth
Toby Barlow William Heinemann, 312pp, £12.99
If werewolves really do exist nowadays, then they are much more likely to appear on the crowded streets of Los Angeles than on a foggy Yorkshire moor. As anyone who has found himself adrift in night-time LA can attest, the feral demeanour of its inhabitants as they prowl Sunset or Ventura Boulevard more closely suggests the dark imaginings of the Brothers Grimm than the sunny world of The OC. And this does not even take into account what happens during daylight hours in the offices of studio executives, entertainment lawyers and talent agents.
Toby Barlow envisions this primal atmosphere in his daringly original, jaggedly uneven Sharp Teeth. Written in verse (or at least a style that resembles verse), Barlow’s debut novel depicts a group of Angelenos who are able to shift between human and canine forms at will. The main pack is led by a cunning werewolf with the unlikely name of Lark. He is a BMW-driving attorney who funds his group’s activities by having them perform violent robberies of meth labs on behalf of powerful drug-dealing clients. In addition to occasional challenges from pack members out to assume his leadership role, Lark must also keep an eye peeled for threats from rival lycanthropic gangs, most notably a group of surfer-wolves. And then there’s the problem of Mr Venable, a bridge-playing homosexual gangster who has been sniffing around the edges of Lark’s pack for unspecified but distinctly menacing reasons.
Further trouble comes when Lark’s woman takes up with Anthony, a city dogcatcher who cannot understand why his colleagues in “animal control” are experiencing such a high mortality rate. The pack’s activities also come to the attention of Peabody, a woebegone city police detective who cannot bring himself to accept what the evidence is plainly telling him. The mixture of these various pyrotechnic elements leads to an elaborate showdown in the California desert that explosively mixes primitive combat with modern weaponry.
For the first half of the book, Barlow skilfully interweaves these various narrative strands, making for a wondrously strange story. His evocation of an urban werewolf underworld is both inventive and probable. The author also provides a morbidly funny satire on mankind’s current condition – his werewolves’ tendency towards unprovoked violence and ruthless scheming seems more human than animal. Evolution, Barlow suggests, has in many ways simply allowed man to perfect his inner beast. “And if you kill,” Lark counsels his pack members, “kill the unmournable – /deserters, wanderers, rustlers, rum runners, drug dealers,/men who will never be missed. Life goes on./The light asks little from those who send the darkness away.”
The author is also very skilled at charting the erotic intersection between his human and canine worlds. Dogcatcher Anthony and his werewolf lover, as well as Lark and the lonely woman with whom he hides when the heat is on, possess the book’s most profound relationships. Sharp Teeth’s author is clearly a dog-lover, as demonstrated when he reminds us of “the sublime form of a dog as she lies/curled up like a comma/in the cool forgiving summer shade”.
Unfortunately, Barlow loses control of his narrative as he approaches the raucous finale. Plot takes over at the expense of atmosphere. Allegiances and actions become difficult to track; imagery that was initially so arresting grows flat:
Back in the city, perched on the rooftop like a crow
watching the Econolines being loaded with serious muscle,
he had sensed the scale of what he was up against and
a yawning black hole of doubt opened up inside him.
Indeed, as the above passage shows, there is not much true verse to be found in this “novel-in-verse”. For the most part, there does not seem to be any compelling reason for the text’s lines to be broken up as they are; they certainly aren’t metrical in any discernible way. There are occasionally fine turns of phrase, but these have the merits of good prose, not poetry. In the end,
Barlow’s style is not Homeric or Byronic, but rather resembles the hard-bitten pulp fiction of James M Cain or John D MacDonald (if their pages had been scrambled at the printer’s). The resulting hybrid style is considerably less successful than the scintillating crossbreeds that populate the novel.
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