A Review of Survivor By Chuck Palahniuk

For me, the plot device of the main character acting as narrator of his own tale into a recorder on his doomed vessel is rather a favorite. One of the first short stories I wrote (in the sixth grade, when I was first discovering Arthur C. Clarke) was just that: the last survivor of a doomed intersteller mission to found a colony so the human race could survive the destruction of Earth by our sun. The main theme of that story was miscalculation: scientists miscalculated the time until our sun would supernova; scientists miscalculated the oxygen recycling on the ship sent to save them. The only hope of my protagonist was that an alien species would eventually decipher his message, because there weren't any humans left to. He gets a little loopy toward the end and then abruptly cuts off as his oxygen starved brain falls into a last deep sleep. I do wish I still had it.

Palahniuk's protagonist is not in such dire straits: humanity will live on without him; the flight recorder is guaranteed to survive his plane crash. I suppose that is something of a play in the title - is Tender Branson the survivor, or is it the flight recorder? Of course, it is still a weirdly dark book. Branson was part of a cult in central Nebraska that bred children for purposes similar to George R. R. Martin's Craster: all boys after the first are named Tender because they work as slaves tending to other people's things; all girls are named Biddy because the do other's bidding. The cult sends these Tenders and Biddies out to be in the world but not of it, laboring away and sending their earnings back to support the cult. Of course, all religions require their believers to labor for the financial health of the institution, be it tithes or pujas.

The distributed nature of the cult leads their mass suicide - the "Deliverance" they call it - to be an event with a long tail. Indeed, there is a whole government department charged with the task of keeping them alive. Naturally, said institution executes their charge with gross incompetence, even allowing a murderer from among the remaining cult members to finish off those who fail to shuffle loose the mortal coil quickly enough. In the end the protagonist is the only remaining survivor except for the murderer who no one believes exists or knows about and who happens to be Branson's twin brother. Knowing Palahniuk to have also been the author of Fight Club I wondered throughout the whole book if the brother Adam wasn't actually just another side of Tender.

Being the 'last survivor', Branson is then drawn into a new cult: the cult of personality. It is there that he reluctantly becomes the figurehead of his own religious movement and Palahniuk heaps upon him all the vices of celebrity. This part of the tale is more than a little forced.

So why do we like reading tales of the mentally disturbed? Why do I like reading tales of the mentally disturbed? One of the last fiction books I read, Matthew Quick's The Good Luck of Right Now, was also in this vein. Perhaps it is because we are all a little mental and having a window into someone else's head makes your own feel a little less alien. The stream of consciousness is part of the human condition. Our thoughts are a river always running. Sometimes mine feel like a raging torrent that I can hardly hope to control. I daydreamed alot as a child as my river spread out into little rivulets rather than the join the boring canal so many teachers tried to prod me into. Eventually I learned to find sufficiently interesting problems to harness the river to complete monu-mental tasks. After all, is it not in the locale of the raging cataract that building the mill is most fruitful?