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And The Ass Saw The Angel
Nick Cave
Black Spring hardback, 251 pages, £12.95
Review by Gerald Houghton (1990)

3. Then the Lord opened the eyes of Balaam, and he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way, and he bowed down his head and fell flat on his face. – Numbers, 22.

In many ways the idea of ‛rock star’ turning novelist inspires one to approach the bookshelves about as much as the acting of Bowie or Sting attracts one to the local Odeon. It comes as something of a surprise, therefore, that Nick Cave’s And The Ass Saw The Angel, his first fiction of any length, is anything but the prose equivalent of his thespian compatriots board trading.

Born into the cane-growing valley of the Ukulites, an extreme religious sect, the gods stack the odds heavily against Euchrid Eucrow from the outset. His mother brews and consumes a variety of vicious raw liquors, and his father takes delight from the sadistic collection and systematic torture of animals. Euchrid, malformed and dumb from birth, becomes an obsessive observer of the valley folk and, in particular, Cosey Mo, the harlot on the hill.

Inflamed by an itinerant preacher, the valley folk attack Casey Mo who, at the end of her young life, returns to the valley to abandon her new child, Beth. The child’s arrival coinciding with the lifting of the curse of eternal rain that has plagued the Ukulites. To the people, she is their saviour; to Euchrid, she is evil and has to be destroyed; to Beth, our deformed narrator is Jesus Christ . . . 

Anyone familiar with Cave’s obsessions will see much of them in this twisted tale. Themes and phrases from his vinyl output appear again and again within the text – Euchrid is a surviving twin, torn from his mother during a downpour; Sorrow the Turk’s nag falls victim to Cave’s attentions once more; and Euchrid makes his secret hideaway deep within the swamp.

The richness of language which makes up much of Cave’s beloved Bible informs much of his own prose, the obscurity of some of his carefully chosen words often facilitating the need to read with the book in one hand and a dictionary in the other. But, the cumulative effect is to pull a dense black shroud over events as they slide inexorably into violence, insanity and (inevitably) death.

And The Ass Saw The Angel is not a book to be dipped into occasionally or approached lightly – it owes as much to the literary novel as it does to pure storytelling – but Cave has once again confounded critics and crafted a book every bit as striking as his music; a telling debut whose images will linger long after its conclusion. •

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