The Hunter-S.-Thompsonesque protagonist is a Manchester kid who doesn’t want a 9-5 job and jumps at the chance to travel East. He meets an unemployed, paranoid Japanese misfit named Michi, and together they try to run a scheme in Ho Chi Minh City. Throughout the narrative are drugs, the seedy underbellies of cities, sleaze, decadence and some laughs at the expense of other Western tourists.
The whole narrative is so stylized, owing a lot to Hunter S. Thompson in both content and style, but sometimes also bearing a little resemblance to Leopold Bloom’s disjointed ramblings in Ulysses. Descriptions are often verbose, the prose glittering like flashing city lights: “Serotonin swirled about in my gut. My jaw clenched and my pupils dilated. I left the arcade through the rear exit, followed a troupe of teenage girls distributing handkerchiefs in French maid outfits and found a compact independent games retailer further along the thoroughfare. An E-candy store of a million primary colours, blue skies, big hair, violence, sex, demons, scattered power stones and high adventure in plaid miniskirts. I rubbed my eyes and saw giant rainbow pixels.” Sometimes, though, it condenses into more of an imagist aesthetic, speaking in a series of evocative sentence fragments: “Depth of field. Shimmering heat. Fish eye lens effect. A freshly laid tarmac road and a big colourful jelly bean blur ahead.”
Aside from the writing, another stand-out in CLOUD STORAGE is the tragicomic (mostly tragic) character of Michi. An avatar for an entire lost generation of Japan’s youth, but also bearing more than a little resemblance to unemployed or underemployed 20-somethings here in the United States, Michi’s tragedy, as filtered through the narrator’s drunken, MDMA-colored haze, is so poignant, so powerful, that it positively moves one to tears. His life story, going from a university education to living under a bridge and spouting conspiracy theories, is so painfully sad, and yet, his exchanges with the main character are also so funny and full of genuine chemistry, that his character cannot be defined by tragedy alone.
The story of a changing continent and one Westerner’s love of its beautiful sleaze, CLOUD STORAGE is stylistically dazzling; filled with depth and detail that make locations like the North of England, Hong Kong, China, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam come alive in strange and lurid ways that are as grotesque as they are funny, and as funny as they are thoughtful.
Reviewed by Charles Baker for IndieReader.