Taking a sharp pen to the born-to-rule machines

June 4, 1997
Issue 

The Crocodile Club
By Kaz Cooke
Allen & Unwin, 1997. 230 pp., $14.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The comic genius of Kaz Cooke has been let loose again with the paperback release of her novel, The Crocodile Club. There is no funnier cure than Kaz for the conservative social poisons clotting up the body politic of our times.

Selina Plankton is an out-of-work magician's assistant, evicted tenant and owner of a fridge whose contents resemble nothing more than science experiments. She is desperately trying to unshackle from Briian the Crazed Architect, who she is fast discovering to be a "weasel-dick" and "living proof that one should never go to bed on the first date" (or, in the case of Briian, even the 753rd date).

The plot twists in ways that would make a chiropractor drool when Selina flies to the rescue of her friend Miranda, ABC journalist in Darwin, who is facing threats to her life expectancy from toughs hired through Briian by the NT minister for zoning, cops and sleaze for her efforts to expose the minister's personal financial gains from a rezoning rort for a multimillion-dollar resort complex on public land.

Selina gets kidnapped, but help is on its way in the improbable form of two aficionados of lurid Hawaiian shirts, Jock Jovanovich, Serbo-Scottish psychiatrist, and his colleague Eric Urbanburger, "also a crazy psychiatrist, but he had a better excuse — he was from North America".

In the heroes' posse, too is Women's Business (an Aboriginal singing group), Rolf (Jock's blue heeler) and Hiram P. Doppelganger (one of Jock's patients, who believes himself to be a millionaire entrepreneur and a close personal friend of the nation's treasurer despite Jock's attempt to cure him by pointing out that it is exceedingly unlikely that the nation's treasurer has any close personal friends).

Along the way, Kaz takes accurate pot shots at a range of right-wing social targets such as penal policy ("We don't 'fry' people in this country. We're civilised. We throw them into a black hole of hopelessness and violence for a few years and expect them to reform") and the commercial appropriation of indigenous culture (the fashion designer from America, "who comes to the Territory to 'learn' from Aborigines, in other words, rip off their totems and designs, mass produce them as 'leisure wear' sewn by exhausted Filipinas in a locked factory and sell them in First World chain stores for outrageous prices").

Her main target is the Crocodile Club — government and business executives, "profit-driven, amoral, plundering, wall-eyed, greedy, complacent old blokes with hardened arteries and bat-shit where their souls should be .... who tell the tourists that crocs have evolved over millions of years into the perfect killing machine but who themselves have developed over millions of long lunches into the perfect born-to-rule machines".

Be prepared to shed tears of laughter as Kaz sharpens her wit against a worthy bunch of villains in her little blockbuster of a satire.

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