Book Review & Literary Analysis: The Gas by Charles Platt

The Gas

by Charles Platt

      I will say from the start that I believe no book should ever be banned on the grounds of obscenity. Having said that, if there ever was a book that was likely to be burned it would be The Gas by Charles Platt. That was exactly what happened. When originally printed in 1970, the uptight British censors got a hold of most copies, banned the book and sent the remaining print run straight to the incinerator. I’ll agree with the censors on one thing though: this novel certainly is obscene. It recklessly crashes through all taboos in a frenzy that is nothing less than sadistic. Of course that doesn’t mean it should be banned or burned. Quite the opposite. It should be studies, analyzed, and interpreted. We may even learn something in the process. Fortunately, this short novel was reprinted in 1980 and if you are lucky or unlucky enough to find a copy, you can further enlighten yourself in the ways of sexuality that are dirtier than sewer water.

It doesn’t take long for things to start happening. With minimal background or plot development, the lead character Vincent steals a Rolls Royce and picks up an attractive yound hitchhiker named Cathy. You can see where this is going already. After some explicitly described sex that reads like the rougher passages in Letters to Penthouse, Vincent explains that they are in great danger. He works at a military chemical weapons laboratory where a toxic gas has accidentally been released into the atmosphere. The gas causes peole to go into a trance where they lose all sexual inhibitions and morality falls away just as easily as underwear at a nudist colony. As the gas spreads over England, massive orgies ensue and anybody who has been affected sinks deeper into pits of uninhibited violence and depravity. If you are easily disturbed by graphic depictions of paraphilias, this isn’t a book for you.

Vincent’s plan is to rescue his family who live in London. He wants to take his wife, son, and daughter up to Scotland where the gas has not reached. He takes Cathy along with the intention of rescuing her and, after crashing the Rolls Royce, he hijacks a car being driven by a priest who he intends to rescue also. What could possibly go wrong? Well to start, after receiving two head injuries, Cathy starts going crazy and having delusions about Vincent being a communist or fascist secret agent who unleashed the gas deliberately. And the priest, after abandoning his vow of celibacy to indulge in a menage a trois, begins to...how can I say it nicely?...involve his bodily fluids and excretions in the act of making love all the while whimpering and sniveling because he has forsaken his pact with God.

At this point, the novel may seem like nothing but a sick pornographic fantasy with a plot as thin as wet toilet paper. It does, however, provide us with some symbols for consideration. One involves the way that social roles enforce sexual taboos. Vincent’s act of rescuing a nubile young woman, a priest, and a his family represent ways that, in a Freudian sense, libido or sexual energy, are held in check in order to make society functional. Within the nuclear family, sexuality is kept in check through the incest taboo, preventing sexual relations between children and their parents. The expression of that sexual energy is also contained while being expressed in the relationship between husband and wife. The socially constructed taboo against extra-marital sex is represented by Cathy whose presence in Vincent’s cell threatens to rupture the sexual energy contained in his family’s structure. Note that Cathy becomes more threatening to Vincent as she slips into her psychotic delusions. The priest also represents the social taboo of familial sanctity, an extra-legal taboo that is enforced through the institution of the church. It should also be noted that the priest is the one who introduces taboo bodily fluids like urine, feces, and blood into the sexual activities .of Vincent and his crew. The purest and most morally spotless member, the man representing the cleanliness of the spiritual through his role as religious authority and arbiter of religious practice is associated with filth. The packaging of religion with filth is not new; it was St. Augustine, for example, who said that we are born between feces and urine, indicating our lowly status as the excrement of God’s creation.

There are social, psychological, and biological reasons why bodily substances are taboo. The ingestion of another person’s blood, feces, or urine could potentially be fatal and so psychologically people regard them with disgust. Seeing excessive amounts of your own blood could also be reviled as it might be a warning sign that you are in danger of bleeding to death. Through the course of evolution, we have developed a physical, olfactory revulsion towards feces and urine because that is our body’s way of telling us that it is not food and ingesting it could potentially kill us. Unrestrained sexuality can lead to overpopulation or high rates of birth defects when the incest taboo is broken. If we go by the logic of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, libido needs to be contained and sublimated into industrial productivity because if the proletariat if fucking more than working then the capitalist system can not sustain itself. There is a good reason why “make love not war” was a slogan of the 1960s. Therefore, semen, feces, urine, and blood are all substances that need to be contained in their proper vessels. We have built psychological defenses and social taboos, mainly enforced through the institutions of religion, law, and social praxis to keep them hidden, presumably for the benefit of the common good. Violation of these taboos are existential threats to Vincent in the guise of the psychotic Cathy and the germ infested priest. But notice that no direct threat to Vincent comes when he violates the incest taboo, an aspect of this story which could have been one of the main reasons why this book was burned by the British authorities.

Anyhow, returning to the story...Vincent agrees to stop in Cambridge en route to Scotland because Cathy’s brother lives there, potentially able to let her stay until the gas cloud goes away. Cathy’s brother Edmond is a student studying the science of experimental psychiatry at the university. By the time Vincent and his group get there, he has already succumbed to the influence of the gas. An orgy with him, his landlady Mrs. Dunnell, and everybody else takes place. Ther is no need to analyze the sex here, but it is gross and offensive. It’s also cartoonish and sometimes ridiculous. Honestly, at this point, the excessive sex gets to be redundant and dull, even if the author does take it up a notch or two. When the minuscule plot fades into the background, being overridden by page after page of violent sex, the sex starts to seem like filler more than anything. Besides, an engineering student might initially be fascinated the first few times he sees an engine’s pistons popping, but by the time he gets to retirement the sight is so familiar that it no longer holds any fascination. Yes, sex is exciting but an elderly man might say that there isn’t much difference between rubbing one off and taking a leak. That’s where the spectacle of outre sex in this book ends up. If you’ve already read the works of William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, or the Marquis de Sade then this literary territory won’t be anything new to you anyways. And if you actually find any of it arousing, then you will probably wind up in jail someday.

Fortunately, the carnal indulgences recede towards the end as the plot emerges back into the open. Vincent gets tricked into participating in one of Edmond’s experiments at the university and the results lead to the murder of people who represent Vincent’s deepest insecurities. This horrifies him but also proves to be cathartic, giving him a sense of liberation and greater agency in the conduct of his life. Edmond provides him with a psychological profile that also helps, as well as insults, before going on to explain that he plans on conducting further experiments to find out how he can use the effects of the gas to control Cambridge University. Here the author presents us with his view of the institutions of science and psychiatry as being a means of social control, an emerging field in the technology of domination, one that will replace religion as the primary means of oppression which can be seen in the light of the novel’s next passage.

Vincent gets abducted and taken into a church that is filled with a congregation of young lesbians. Rock music has replaced the church organ. On the altar stands the psychotic Cathy, vowing to kill al men and standing over a pile of naked male corpses who were castrated before being snuffed. Elements of the youth counter-culture of the 1960s, the Sexual Revolution, and the upsurge of radical feminism have fused into a cult of Neo-Paganism. It is reminiscent of Euripides’ Greek tragedy The Bacchae in which the Maenads, followers of the god Dionysus, go into a frenzy and behead King Pentheus. Like the Maenads, Cathy’s cult has entered into a trance where the free reign of their libido leads to the slaughter of the patriarchal overlords who sit at the top of society. Vincent gets taken up to the altar in preparation for the ceremonial sparagmos, but gets saved by the priest who runs into the cathedral. The priest and Cathy kill each other, Vincent escapes to find his family, and the church collapses.

In this scene, a movement of Pagan reawakening threatens the social engineering of the traditional Christian church. The Pagans are lesbians run by a young woman while the church is represented by an elderly priest. The young are supplanting the old, a practice of sexual liberation is replacing the theology of sexual repression, the old is giving way to the new or maybe it’s more accurate to say the primal is reasserting itself over the modern. In the end, Cathy and the priest cancel each other out through mutual destruction. Religion is dead, making room for the amoral institution of scientific discipline to become the means of social and psychological domination.

The story ends with Vincent and his family escaping to Scotland as the effects of the gas wear off. Once across the border, their lives stabilize and the nuclear family unit remains intact. But there is a catch. Let’s say that the last scene ends with Vincent and his wife proving that they believe in “keeping love in the family.” After going through the experience of losing all inhibitions under the influence of the gas, the family can not go back to where they were before it all started. They have adjusted to a new reality, one in which they can function despite having a new orientation to their sexuality. The family unit remains the basis of social order, but family values have been radically altered. The preoccupations of the 1960s all filter into this story including sexual liberation, the military industrial complex, the breaking of taboos, and the places held by science and religion in the modification of social relationships. I believe that Charles Platt is saying that once we have gone through the cultural transformations of the 1960s, there is no going back so we have to find a way to live with it whether we like it or not.

There was a point where I considered not finishing The Gas. This book did thoroughly disgust me, but that’s not the reason I almost quit. The excessive descriptions of sex just bored me at times and often felt pointless. But in the end, the plot did hold up and the story does make a statement. Compared to Charles Platt’s Garbage World, a far superior novel in its execution and social critique, this one just barely held my interest. In comparison, Garbage World analyzed society the way we used to dissect frogs in high school biology classes, that is with precise use of a scalpel so that the different organs could be extracted and looked at carefully. The Gas doesn’t work the same way; it is more like stomping on the frogs until their guts squirt out and then throwing their entrails around until they are a gelatinous ooze dripping down other student’s faces. Similar to a cafeteria food fight, it’s like a biology class frog fight. Your average bukkake video is more sanitary in contrast. It assaults society and it assaults the reader almost as if Platt is trying to induce uncontrolled nausea in his audience. He almost pulls that off and I’m sure that for some squeamish readers he actually does. And the title leaves me wondering if it has a double meaning. The gas is the catalyst for the whole story, being an agent manufactured for chemical warfare, but “gas” can also have other meanings. Getting gassed can mean being drunk or intoxicated and having a gas can mean having a good time as in, “The party last night was a real gas, wasn’t it?” This novel is a sex and violence party and I’m sure Charles Platt had a gas writing it, even if the results were not as profound as he would have intended.

 

Book Review

Garbage World

by Charles Platt

     “Touch-a touch-a touch-a touch me/I wanna be dirty,” sang Janet Weiss, played by Susan Sarandon, in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It could very well be the theme song of Roach, a character in Garbage World by Charles Platt since it fits his transformation from neat-freak to filth monger as the plot progresses. Roach is the pivot on which the novel turns. It is a book with a simple and unoriginal plot, and it makes a definite statement about class conflict, but it isn’t an entirely serious book and if you read it thatv way, it can be rewarding.

Somewhere in outer space there is a political entity called the United Asteroid Belt Pleasure Worlds Federation. While the asteroids these people inhabit are never fully described, we do learn that they are a high-tech civilization with high living standards, and an abundance of wealth. Their biggest problem is waste disposal. What they do is fill up blimps with garbage and then drop them on another asteroid named Kopra, which is also the Greek word for “feces”. The problem is that so much trash has been dropped on Kopra that the asteroid is fracturing under the weight and will soon break into pieces, spreading all the garbage throughout the immediate surroundings and ruining the cleanliness of the more developed asteroids in the federation.

Roach arrives in a spaceship with his commanding officer Larkin with plans to move the inhabitants of Kopra off the asteroid until they are able to fix it to prevent the catastrophe. The people living on Kopra are led by Gaylord, a giant bearish man with no sense of cleanliness or refinement. He earned his status as leader by accumulating the biggest hoard of junk which he has organized and labeled like pieces in a museum in his basement. His hoard makes Gaylord powerful because he is resourceful enough to know what to do with all his garbage when the time requires it. Larkin and Roach are anal-retentive germaphobes, but Gaylord finds common ground with Roach and a friendship grows between them. Roach also falls in love with Gaylord’s daughter Juliette. Gaylord also has a son named Oliver who leans a little bit more to the clean side and secretly agrees to help Larkin who has not been entirely honest about their mission on Kopra.

Roach is a bit of a humanitarian whose job is to collect information about the inhabitants of Kopra. He goes about studying them like an anthropologist. By that I mean he studies them with all the haughtiness and contempt that anthropologists in the colonial era studied so-called “primitive societies”. Still he cares enough about the Koprans to want to save them from their dirty and lowly status in the universe. Larkin, however, cannot be trusted and his plan is to exterminate the people there along with his efforts to prevent Kopra from exploding and polluting the entire asteroid belt with the filth his people have dumped on Kopra.

There are other inhabitants on the asteroid they call the Nomads. They live in the jungle under much rougher conditions and also survive by scavenging the junk that falls in blimps from the sky. Roach sets out with Gaylord and Juliette to find the Nomads so they can bring them back to the spaceship to be taken away while the asteroid of Kopra gets repaired. However, somebody sabotaged their vehicle and they come close to death, but the nomads save them from disaster. T o their surprise, the nomads turn out to be peaceful and hospitable people. The whole middle section of this novel is a series of adventures in the strange and dirty landscape of Kopra. Along the way, Roach begins to respect the Koprans more and more as he becomes accustomed to being dirty and gradually adapting to the environment of filth.

Roach’s transformation is complete when he falls into a warm mud pit with Juliette and the two get it on, having some truly dirty sex. This was actually my favorite part of the novel; Platt’s description of love making while submerged in warm and slimy mud was actually quite arousing. It wasn’t overly described either. There was just enough there to give you the tactile sensation necessary to make Kopra seem like it could actually be a nice place to visit. Needless to say, Roach has gone native at this point and, for him, there is no turning back.

Beyond that, I will just say you have to read the book to find out what happens.

Garbage World is a lot like the pulp science-fiction adventure stories of the 1920s and I am sure the author was aware of that. Those stories often had a colonialist mentality either latent or overt. A courageous spaceman travels to another planet or another dimension and encounters tribes of dangerous creatures that often bear the physical characteristics of non-European people. The hero falls in love with a local female and manages to escape before getting chopped up and eaten, killed by bug-eyed monsters, or flayed with primitive lasers. Garbage World turns this whole fictional paradigm on its head. In the post-colonial 1970s, there were more than a few social scientists pushing the idea that colonial subjects were just as human as the colonists and deserved to be treated as such. Charles Platt obviously took a cue from this change in attitudes and wrote Garbage World. It is an obvious critique of the way people in developed countries treat people in the Third World. The people of Kopra are portrayed as being resourceful and intelligent enough to make the most of their living conditions, even thriving on Kopra, finding happiness and the full realization of their human potential. Meanwhile the neat-freaks who invade their territory are the ones who created the conditions on Kopra and then plot to destroy them for being dirty, useless, and primitive. The dirty people of Kopra are the good ones while their technocratic adversaries reveal a link between colonialism, fascism, and obsessive cleanliness. By the end of the book, dirtiness is a virtue and Kopra looks like a borderline utopia. This book also reflects the growing concerns over ecology and environmentalism of the times in the 1970s.

Charles Platt’s Garbage World is a simple book on the surface. It was written primarily for entertainment. But when looked at in the context of the time when it was written, and the chronological space it holds in the progression of science-fiction writing, it makes a definite humanitarian statement. Despite the statement it makes, it is not a serious work of literature and it should not be approached as one. But if read solely for fun, the morality of the story may come out a lot more strongly. So go ahead and read it for fun and see what happens. Just don’t hide it under your mattress so your mother won’t find it; it’s not that kinds of a dirty book. And if anybody ever wants to have some filthy sex in a warm mud puddle, remember this book and don’t deny yourself that opportunity.