Scar Culture
by Toni Davidson
From the back cover:
With the power of the spoken word and the authenticity of a research document, Scar Culture follows the lives of Click, Fright, and their dysfunctional therapist Sad. Using experimental techniques, Sad tries to bring Click and Fright out of the stupor to which they have succumbed from childhood abuse. Tempering the story with the darkest humor, Toni Davidson makes us confront the meaning of being human in this challenge to psychotherapy.
First Paragraph:
Click
I heard the groans first, 17 whistling, chest groans, the familiar rumble of my father's tones, seeping out the cracks in the wooden slats of the hut. I nursed my slight injuries from the fall--grazed skin on my arms and legs, a deeper bruise on my back where my t-shirt had been torn and inadvertently camouflaged and a throbbing head from numerous root thuds--but the grazes and bruises were nothing, I had the resilience of expectation, an incredible, believable shield that was such a strong armour.
Then.
This book is split into 5 parts: Click's story, Fright's story, Sad's story, then the planning and execution of Sad's controversial and experimental form of therapy. Each character's view point is vastly different and unique, which Davidson made excellent use of later on.
The first story is of Click, a boy living in a caravan with his sex-driven and obsessively-compulsively clean mother and his erratic-behaved father, who is suffering the end-phase of some sort of head tumor. Though neither parent is outwardly physically hurtful to Click, the environment itself along with their odd behaviors is certainly enough to screw up his childhood. Click has distanced himself by inventing a 'head camera', with which he takes pictures with his mind during climatic moments of his fear. And when his mother gets him his first and only gift--a real camera--both are used in capturing random moments of Click's life. His story ends after his mother, having enough of her husband's bizzare outbursts, leaves and soon thereafter, the child services agency arrives to separate Click and his father.
Fright's story is much less confusing and much more heartbreaking--the type of story you would expect when dealing with child abuse. Fright and his brother Jake live in an apartment with their mother and violent father. The boys' only source of kindness comes from their mother, and Fright's memories of her are strong. After she is killed by their father, his violence is unleashed and the boys can rely only on each other. Fright looks up to Jake as his older, smarter brother--but Jake's streak of rebellion and protectiveness make him the target for their father's abuse. Before long, the apartment is tranformed into a sort of refuge for drug addicts and perverts, and the boys are secluded to a small room behind a flowered curtain--which they are warned never to go through. After a particularly brutal beating, curiosity gets the best of Fright and with Jake unconscious, enters his father's dark domain. Rape is implied. Fright's story ends when his father drives both boys out to the country, beats them up, then leaves with Jake and Fright is abandoned.
With Sad's adult character comes an adult voice--which is a welcome but less emotional change after becoming accustomed to the boys' thoughts and speech. Sad is a somewhat pretentious therapist, who disdains his fellows at the 'hospital' he works for because they are afraid to break rules, afraid to think outside the box. He views the hospital as a sort of mill that receives damaged people, patches a band-aid over them, and kicks them out again without ever really helping people or getting to the route of their problems. But while his initial motives may be good, Sad is pretty messed up himself. Since childhood, he's been studying the sexual development of himself, his friends, his sister. He kept textbooks instead of porn, and has seen a few therapists himself but even at such a young age, manipulated them. It is slowly revealed that all through his childhood, he tormented his sister just short of actually assaulting her--but she apparently was a willing subject to his studies. And now, they live together and are, in fact, incestuous.
One day, a fellow specialist in 'inter-family sex' contacts Sad from abroad, with grand fantasies of turning the psychology field upside down. He has come in contact with a seemingly-mute boy and wants to do whatever necessary to 'correct' the boy. He urges Sad to follow in his footsteps, to make a name for himself, to stop droning away his life and career and make a difference. Soon thereafter, Sad is informed of two highly disturbed boys that have come into treatment at his hospital, but that no one can make any amount of headway with. These, Sad decides, are the oppurtunities he has been waiting for.
What follows is an ever-increasingly disturbing account of Sad's possession of Click and Fright, now each grown up and extremely unbalanced: Click has been bounced from shelter to shelter, mute and unresponsive to any sort of therapy, while Fright has just been literally scraped from his mattress in the apartment where he has been waiting years for Jake to return, covered in filth and nearly emaciated. Sad is granted access to an unused wing of the hospital, a large empty room where he divides the length into two rooms on either side of a hallway, and each boy--man--is kept in isolation and observed. Sad almost immediately discovers that inside of Click's only surviving childhood possession, a stuffed bear, are rolls of undeveloped film--further proof to Sad that all other therapists are worthless and uninterested. He gives Click a dark room, and before long, Click has hundreds of images stung about his room and is writing captions for each. Fright, on the other hand, constantly mumbles. He is given a tape recorder and Sad listens to the tapes, full of recounts of abuse and longing for Jake, and their mother. Sad does indeed make progress with each boy where no one could before, but the story takes a turn for the worse.
Sad decides to experiment on the men, by recreating their environments from childhood in hopes that the overwhelming shock of it will cause some big breakthrough. This sent a chill of foreboding down my spine and as the story neared climax, each page became harder to read then the last. Sad injects Click and Fright with a drug to keep them asleep while Sad and four other patients build a caravan around Click, and hang a flowered curtain around Fight. During this ever-increasing madness, Sad's sanity becomes even more questionable by his sister's doll-like presence, morphing in age before our very eyes. As Sad loses control, everything around him comes tumbling down as well.
The book is GOOD. It is disturbing and controversial and you'll find yourself forming opinions--strong opinions--and (hopefully) protesting. It is very visual--I felt like I'd just watched a movie. I don't think I've EVER been as involved in a story and concerned for the outcome of its characters. After being in the heads of those two boys, and then seeing what was being done to them, I can't imagine how any reader would not feel something. This book was not afraid to 'go there', and its courage is appluadable. Very strong writing, strong characters, and very real.
Just be warned--you'll be hesitant to visit the psychologist anytime soon.
Five stars out of five
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