No sleep with this 'Lullaby'

The media control your mind, and so will Chuck Palahniuk's precision-cutting thriller

Lullaby

By Chuck Palahniuk

Published by Anchor, 2002

Available at Amazon.com, US$11

Reviewed by Marquie Leelatham

Imagine a camera that captures everything and spares no detail, no matter how trivial. That's what Chuck Palahniuk's prose is like in his tragedy-fantasy thriller "Lullaby".

It resembles an effective camera that captures every minor detail of his characters' movements, from the sound of their feet scuffling across the floor to the look of dead corpses lying drenched in blood.

It captures it all, sparing nothing and including everything, in the hands of a literary genius like Palahniuk, with impact, style and poignancy. These are the qualities we all look for in a good novel.

"Lullaby" revolves around a journalist's discovery of a spell that can cull mankind. At first glance it might seem like a straightforward mystery, but don't be fooled, because Palahniuk plunges deep into his main theme - how the mass media that Orwell called "Big Brother" controls our minds and desires.

Despite this theme being deftly explored in dystopian literature (Orwell's "1984", Murakami's "Dance, Dance, Dance" and much more), Palahniuk introduces his own questions, and in doing so compels the reader to question everything we are spoon-fed by the media.

We must question everything we see, hear and even do, ask why we desire what we desire and how the mass media guide our preferences. What precisely does "free will" mean?

Palahniuk explores all of this with prose that photographs every tile in the mosaic, and the result is, of course, nothing less than extraordinary.

However, as we all know, no work of literature is perfect. The one criticism I have of this novel is the occasional lack of fluidity and logic between scenes.

We aren't really given a clue as to why characters do what they do or how they do it. A harsher critic might also complain there are too many loose strands left to the story, but others will say that's just Palahniuk's style. It's his way of getting the reader hooked and begging for more.

If indeed his aim is to get the reader sprawled on the floor, begging for more, he's hit the bull's eye. "Lullaby", even at a mere 200-odd pages, is not a novel you can lay down easily and forget.

It remains imprinted in your memory, nagging at you with the questions it's raised. You do in fact end up questioning your every motive, and begging for more Palahniuk.

This is a novel that's bound to get you hooked, irretrievably and irrevocably.