KS Silkwood - King Of The Jungle

From Rimbaud swapping literary Paris for the life of a gun-runner in Africa to the inhabitants of the ‘twenty-seven club’, there is a romantic ideal of the artist who for one reason or another turns their back on the act of creation, leaving behind a perfectly-formed body of work. Since Icarus, variations of this story have resonated throughout human history. One paradigm is the bright talent which soars briefly before crashing to earth in tragic fashion - the James Dean version of the myth. The other story is that of the artist who is so overwhelmed by, or scornful of, their work that they turn their back on it forever, like Rimbaud, Richey James (perhaps) or JD Salinger. KS Silkwood’s debut novel The King of the Jungle explores this second version of the prodigal artist story.

Silkwood’s nameless narrator is a former artist, now in his forties. We never hear much about his work, but he was something of a name. An ex-girlfriend remembers his paintings, which she had seen at a group show: ‘a triptych. Really beautiful colours. Abstracts. Like gas or liquid.’ Now, he has swapped the world of openings, shared-studios and group exhibitions for a job as a gardener in a London park, mixing with the tramps and prostitutes, ‘the best dressed woman in Paddington’, ‘the little Irish fairy’, ‘Ronald Polio’ and ‘the shit kids’. 

Endlessly self-mythologizing, the narrator explains his reasons for abandoning ‘the one thing God presumably put me on the earth to do’: ‘Do you know what it takes to do something brilliant? Have you ever felt that feeling? Do you know the price you pay, the effort & the trauma, the friction & conflict necessary to be brilliant? Much safer to avoid the question than to be perplexed by it daily. Eradicate the problem, don't suffer. Be a big fish in a small pond. Or yeah, come on then, be the king of the jungle, a shitty everyday jungle.' Although he has moved away from the status-obsessed art world he is still extremely competitive in his interactions, name-dropping Tarkovsky and Bergman when a tourist asks him what a particular tree is called, and setting himself apart from his colleagues: ‘I’m not your orthodox park-keeper. For starters, I’m not an alcoholic’. He is smug about his decision to turn his back on art, as if he has found a way to play life in cheat-mode, telling a musician he meets 'I understand how you feel, really I do. But you see: I've given up! Really I have. No melancholy for me'.

He takes a similarly belligerent tone with the reader, playing games and being extremely selective with the information he reveals. In the first section particularly, the narrator is extremely unwilling to psycho-analyse his activities, maintaining a surface-level of detail and purposefully keeping the reader at arm’s length: 'What a weekend. Oh... What does it have to do with you? Zero... I'm going to empty the bins. Find that interesting if you can. Brace yourself, it’s a fucking roller coaster.' Gradually, we come to put less and less faith in his version of events. In between his accounts of his dealings with co-workers, office girls and the denizens of the park, he begins to drop hints about his retreat from Art, and his affair with Erica, the wife of a rival. He tells us that he has had an operation on his wisdom tooth which severed a nerve in his face, leaving him with a slur and a slackness in his facial muscles which he grows a beard to disguise. Later, though, our confidence in this version of events is shaken as we hear the ‘shit kids’ describe him as ‘dat drunk tramp dude… dat tramp wid a job we wuz laffin at’.

His pretence finally falls apart when he takes a trip to the Royal Festival Hall, ‘drinking economy vodka out of a two litre water bottle’. He has a chance encounter with his old friend Simon, who is amused by his condition: ‘Have you got the shakes? Classic!’ He still denies being an alcoholic (‘it turns out I’ve been drunk for quite a few years, but it’s not the same’), but we begin to piece together what has been going on during the lacunae in his disjointed narrative. In her recent book A Trip To Echo Spring, Olivia Laing talks about the effect of alcohol on creative minds. The artist, she argues, analyses and scrutinises themselves and their surroundings; alcohol, in sufficient quantities, can help to obliterate the aspects which are too uncomfortable for them to deal with. We see in his analysis of other people’s work that the narrator is interested by physical form – he attends life-drawing classes, and talks about Erica’s ‘anatomical illiteracy’ – yet his own paintings are abstract, a negation of solid form. As his art rearranges the information of his senses, so does his drinking.  

According to the AA, honesty and reconciliation are vital aspects of the alcoholic’s rehabilitation. As the narrator faces up to his problem, he realises the need to make up with Erica, and also becomes more straight-forward in his dealings with the reader. We learn about his struggle for status with his nemesis, Andrei, and find out more about his dealings with his exes. Rather than turning his back on art as an act of spite, he admits that the competitiveness of the art world became too much for him, and he lost nerve: ‘'I gave up art to write a novel. The novel was too ambitious... Too everything. Maybe it’s just rubbish.’

Silkwood’s novel is stylistically reminiscent of Bukowski, or more recently the novels of Tony O’Neill, in its merciless depiction of self-delusion and destructively self-impulsive behaviour. There is even a hint of Luke Haines in the narrator’s scorn for his peers, and rejection of the commercial art world. The disjointed narrative means that there is a series of important revelations towards the end of the novel, giving King of the Jungle a sense of headlong rush. It’s refreshing every so often to encounter such a dislikeable, untrustworthy narrator, and Silkwood has certainly created a memorable voice. The lowlife he inhabits is believably rendered, without a sense of middle-class slumming. King of the Jungle is the first part of a trilogy of novels based on the fringes of the modern art scene, but there is very little in the way of direct satire or commentary here - it will be interesting to see where Silkwood goes next.