Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat [Kindle Edition]

"Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat" starts out paraphrasing the opening soliloquy from the Graham Greene-scripted "The Third Man", and ends rather bravely reinventing dialog from Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon". Whether it's snatched from the book or the closely-related 1941 film by John Huston doesn't matter, since the underlying ideal of this novel is to sever the definition (and underlying prejudices) that often exist between the written word and its cinematic offshoot.

In fact the writer, Andrez Bergen, more often places pride-of-place upon the film versions via his protagonist Floyd Maquina, who idolizes Bogie -- shades of Jean-Paul Belmondo's Michel in "Breathless" -- and Bogart's fellow actor George Sanders.

A self-confessed film-buff who sees the world around him in tones of monochrome and color, Maquina has a fondness for the bottle reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade or Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe -- but perhaps more in-keeping with Hammett's Nick Charles from "The Thin Man". Maquina does a dirty job yet has a conscience that weighs heavier than the Titanic, and is hell bent on a journey of self-destruction through a post-apocalyptic world on its knees, inside a city that's as insidious as it is delusional.

Bergen has a penchant for quick, witty dialog moments that border on the surreal, while the characters around Maquina are both painted with absolute care and pushed to offbeat edges. Hidden amidst these are about a million and one TV and movie references, some crystal clear and others obscure. The reverential homage to 1940s and '50s detective noir sits pretty alongside nods to the classic Hollywood musical like "Top Hat". The influences of Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" and Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" are all too clear, along with Japanese anime and '70s Asian cinema, compressed into a knowing understanding of Australian culture and slang.

Then there are the little red herrings between the lines -- off-the-cuff references to things like "Star Trek", "Winnie-the-Pooh", "The 300 Spartans" and "The Charge of the Light Brigade", which were some of the ones I recognized; others I'm sure are there yet still to be found.

Personally speaking, I found some of the movie allusions overpowering, especially the ones I haven't seen, but it did stoke my interest in heading out to the local DVD store to check these out. What does work here is the developing relationship between Maquina and his principle "femme fatale", Laurel Canyon, which is intriguing and moving, while the bad guys steal the show with some of their bizarre dialog and interaction.

If anything, this makes me want to re-watch The Maltese Falcon", "The Third Man" and "The Big Sleep" all over again.

And I think we really can now add Maquina into any future hard-boiled/noir list that might include Spade, Marlowe, Mike Hammer, Lee Blanchard, V.I. Warshawski and Karl Craven.

I've seen The Future and and it's ... Noir. Tobacco- stained noir at that.

Andrez Bergen's brilliant Tobacco-StainedMountain Goat is set in a Dystopian version of Melbourne, in a not too
distant future, after some sort of catastrophe has wiped out the rest of the world.

The city itself is split into different parts. The uptown area is known as The Dome, a squeaky clean and shining consumerist paradise where the plastic surgery enhanced and empty headed rich live.

Outside the Dome, though, it's a little different. These are dangerous and mean streets, riddled with run down bars, fast food joints.

And Deviants.

Now, most Deviants are 'relocated' elsewhere, keeping the city straight, but some go on the run and it's the job of
the Seekers to track them down.

Floyd Maquina is such a Seeker, enrolled so he can afford to
pay for his wife's hospital bills. Maquina is a great creation - a boozy, chain-smoking,smart mouthed amalgam of every Private Eye you've ever seen n the silver screen.

Since the late part of the twentieth century, so many of us have seen the real world filtered through the television or film cameraman's lens.

And Floyd Maquina is just one of those people.

As is Bergen, of course. T obbacco-StainedMountain Goat is littered, almost cluttered, with cultural references from
Sam Spade to Kurosowa to Cabaret Voltaire to, more obviously, Blade Runner. And is in danger at times of drowning in the stuff but it doesn't, due mainly to the great characters and Andrez Bergen's witty, snappy and immensely
addictive writing.

With Tobacco-StainedMountain Goat , Bergen has created one of the most vibrant, inventive, exciting, funny
and purely enjoyable novels I've read since I don't know when. There's no other way to say it: I loved this book and I want more!

I did not expect to enjoy this book as much as I did. Wow. At the beginning, I was having a bit of trouble trying to orient myself with this nasty, rainy, harsh environment. But then, the story came more into focus, and the characters started coming alive. Jumping from real world to the virtual tests confused me a little bit, but as they seemed to really screw with the poor Seekers taking them, too, I just kinda rolled with it.

I really felt for Floyd in spite of his drunken existance. I hurt for him, I was angry for him, I was right along with him as he started to reach out for loved ones as they started slipping away, family and friends alike. I am fairly young and didn't find myself struggling to figure out the film references (but maybe I'm just a nerd, who knows?) and enjoyed the mixture of languages (which I also didn't need the reference guides for, but appreciated that they were there). The guides at the end were fun for me to read, because I felt Mr. Bergen was conscientious about his readers and wanted his story to be accessible to people of many cultures. I also liked that although the story was set in Australia, Australians weren't the only culture left on the planet.

Floyd is admirably tough and lovable, which takes some strength in a world where people get snatched away for no good reasons thanks to corporate greed and politics. He manages to pull himself from a helpless position in his world to a position of power to try and save people he cares about as well as society in general... at least, whatever's left of it, soggy with acid rain and scarred by stuggling to grow in a dying world. What's scary, though, is that aside from just a little bit of futuristic cosmetic surgery and a few other things, you could look around at the current global climate and see this mess be a real possibility.

That gives me just enough of a spine-chill to hope certain company executives never read this tale, and that humanity hasn't been consumerized into (near) extinction just yet.

--Katherine X, Kindle Book Review.