Review: "Funnelweb"

 

Ryan, Richard, Funnelweb, Pan / Pan Macmillan Australia, Pty., Ltd., Sydney, NSW, Australia, 1998.

Octavo; paperback, illustrated wrappers; 339pp. Text block edges mildly toned; shelfwear to wrappers; mild creasing to covers and spine edges. Good.

 

Oh, spare me!

Life is too short for bad writing and people who slap together this sort of drivel should be turned into Soylent Green to make amends for all of the trees that they’ve murdered. I truly don’t know where to start with this: is it the concept? Is it the quality of writing? The cover art? I guess I’ll just take it as a whole package and the awfulness will spill out from there...

Those of you who don’t live in Australia will not appreciate the terror that Funnel-web Spiders induce in the local population: they are Hobbes-ian nasties of the most pure order – (very) short, nasty and brutish. They are perfectly adapted for their mode of lifestyle and – as Wolverine would say – they’re the best there is at what they do, but what they do... well you know the rest. Say” hello” to a Funnel-web Spider:

 

As arachnids, they live solitary existences, coming together only to breed. They live in cool, moist conditions and hide in leaf litter and under rocks and logs. They spin complex, funnel-shaped webs (hence the name) leading into their lairs: when insects walk over this webbing, the spider knows to leap out and bite whatever’s on their welcome mat. They are sinisterly black with oversize fangs and the females are bigger than the males. On top of all this, they can jump. Boy! Can they jump!

If you saw Peter Jackson’s ‘Shelob’ in “The Lord of the Rings”, you probably squirmed in your seat; Australians, en masse, squirmed harder than any of you.

Before the 1980s, there was no antivenin to combat the poison of these critters, and every summer there were deaths reported; nowadays, thanks mainly to the efforts of Blue Mountains resident Rex Gilroy (who took it upon himself to voluntarily milk these beasties until enough toxin was available for study and processing) bites are dealt with quickly and generally with no loss of life. Still, the Funnel-web is just the apex super-predator on top of a huge arachnid pyramid in this part of the world, so people here tread very carefully outdoors.

So you’d think that a scary novel based upon these nasties would be simple, right? Oh how wrong you are: this is a perfect example of how it’s possible to take a ‘no-brainer’ and rip the guts right out of it. I can only imagine the thought process of the author when putting this together:

“What’s the scariest thing I can think of? Hmmm... I know! A Funnel-web Spider! Great! Let’s run with that! (Research happens) Hmmm... That’s cool, but they’re a bit on the small side to be really scary... I know! I’ll make them HUGE! Yeah! GINORMOUS Funnel-webs! Okay: how do they get big? (Research doesn’t happen) I know! Radiation! They’ll be HUGE, poison-dripping, enraged, eight-legged engines of FURY! And they’ll storm Parliament House...!”

(Sorry – that was a spoiler. I hope I haven’t given too much away...)

The first victim of the spiders’ attack against humanity is a woman introduced to us in paragraph four and known to us only as “silicone-breasted blonde”; she attracts the attention of the ‘hero’ spider who watches her having sex at a party in Mosman. Later, after the spider becomes irradiated by nuclear waste dumped offshore by a passing US submarine (naturally), it launches itself at her in an enraged fury, fuelled by her libidinous indiscretions:

“...the silicone-breasted blonde was close to orgasm. As her ecstasy mounted, she knew she was having the best sex of her life. Which was as well – for it was to be her last.”

This, by page 15; given our level of intimacy with her, you’d think she’d at least develop a name by now.

And that about sums it up for the rest of the book. Apparently, spiders are able to critically analyse human society and make judgements about whether we should live or die, as individuals or as a species. Author Ryan takes us in and out of the thinking of the ‘hero’ spider as it passes sentence upon us, through its rage-hazed mutant psychology. The spiders (more happen), burgeoning from their massive dose of rads, storm Australian culture and society, causing panic and social breakdown until we are reduced to living a “Mad Max”-like existence, struggling each day to hold off the inevitable wave of slobbering, eight-legged horrors, eager to pass sentence upon us.

I don’t think.

To facilitate this silliness, we’re introduced to a reporter in New York who tracks down an ex-pat Aussie expert in arachnids to discuss the wave of spider bites taking place Down Under. As they dig to the bottom of the mystery, they recognise each other’s weltschmerz and come together in romantic mutual salvation to point fingers at those responsible. Along the way they butt heads with weaselly military and political types who want to drop neutron bombs on the arachnids, thus eradicating the menace whilst saving useful infrastructure. Can you guess how many times my copy of this dross hit the wall as I read it?

I was constantly reminded of the recent re-make of “Godzilla” with Matthew Broderick. Here’s a tip: if you’ve seen that film, you’ve read this book. Don’t bother going any further. The critical difference is that that film is about Godzilla (“Gojira-san!”) and there’s decades of discussion about him that makes belief-suspension at least possible: when “Gojira!” first took off in 1954, it did so in a culture where such gross mutation was considered a real possibility; as well, it underscored the horrors of nuclear-proliferation for a newly-irradiated Japan. Nowadays, that boat don’t float. Broderick’s “Godzilla” (1998) suffered because of it; this book suffers... well, because of it also, on top of everything else. Funny that they both came out in the same year...

What else is there to say? Nothing, really. Don’t buy this. Or at least, if you do buy it, use it for toilet paper, or for kindling. Make sure those trees didn’t die in vain.

Half a tentacled horror.