The Museum Of Doubt

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Meek and Mighty - Rated
Once in a while, one comes across a book that threatens to break the mould. Threatens, because it doesn't quite transcend the gap between self-conscious and overtly calculated absurdity, and genuine, inspired literary 'impressionism'. In other words, this book, for me, never quite shakes off the impression that it is trying too hard.

I was prompted to read this book following a review in The Big Issue that compared James Meek to Franz Kafka. This, I thought, must be rather a good omen. Unfortunately, the BI's view was superficial and simplistic. It took one dimension of Meek's book - the underlying feeling of despair (and indeed doubt) - and categorised the entire book with the work of another author popularly connected with these concepts. This does not do justice to Meek or Kafka. Meek's work, for me, tried to perceive the potential of fear and of abstraction at any given moment, in ordinary situations. Kafka was more concerned with the workings of subjugation and surpression on the human mind by more powerful forces, and in extra-ordinary situations.

Despite this, The Museum of Doubt is fantastic book for those that revel in the exploration of the bizarre and perverse. Formed into a number of short stories, Meek's work runs a delicate line between truly shocking, funny, bizarre, and tragic. It is a book unlike any other that I have read, a book that plants seeds implicity in the mind of the reader, and then leaves them to germinate without the interference of explicit explanations or patronising reader directions. The Museum of Doubt is a work of such diverse and myriad subtleties, that the true wonder of the work is that it contains a common thread of resigned darkness.

I recommend it, not as a stable-mate of Kafka, but as one of those works that finds its own category, depending on the reader.