Fiction Review

Retina Green
by Reinhard Filter
Tonronto: Quattro Books, 2010
144 pp. $16.95

Since Chuck Palahniuk’s powerful and widely influential book Fight Club was published in 1996 (and its blockbuster adaptation in 1999), the discussion of the underlying violence of an oppressive, unquestioned social aceptisation of human a behaviors and aspirations exploded. Tales of masculine exits from office jobs into marginality, where protagonists, moved by anger and disillusionment, rebel against social conventions (often aided by another male mentor) in a narrative blurring the lines of reality and dream-states, have emerged as a al most a genre in itself. Retina Green by Reinhard Filter carves its way as an heir to this legacy while distinguishing itself by the gentleness of its prose, used here with precision to perfume themes of destruction, resentment and redemption.

Henry works in the Department of Events Analysis at Urbana Power & Light Company, where most of his days are spent covering up the fact that his employers cut corners that could endanger their customer’s safety. Until one day a young girl dies due to UP&L’s negligence, and Henry is asked to testify on the company’s behalf. The grief-stricken mother takes her own life as a result of this trial, and Henry begins a slow process of self-destruction, wishing he could experience “[t]he beauty of going out in

one

big

blast.

One moment of absolute honesty, then nothing.” The imagery of the bomb, one of many strong allusions displaying the imagination and talent of Filter, swirls throughout the novella like caramel in ice cream. Reflecting Henry’s ‘ticking’ potential to ‘go off,’ and bringing tension to the narrative as well as anticipating another, literal explosion, the motif of a bottled-up, explosive force that constantly (and exhaustingly) has to be kept at bay, poignantly reminds the reader of the pressures of a bureaucratic, blind machine of which Henry is both a part of in his professional life, and a victim of in his personal life.

The undercurrents of anger and guilt threatening to overcome the otherwise passive Henry are treated as symptoms, of which the cause is beyond himself – the system, ultimately, is to blame, since “[a]pparently, being angry because you were an obedient schmuck is antisocial.” Clinging to his resentment and haunted by dreams of the dead Mother, Retina Green, Henry is gradually pushed out of society completely, loosing his job, his apartment, and enters the world of marginality by making his new residence in a garbage dump, under the advice of Torben, his underground mentor.

Troubled by fluid dream sequences that are more like loose therapy sessions than the work of the imagination, and the increasingly domineering Torben, two realities become clear: that Henry longs for redemption, and that it will not be granted.

Filter, however, does present an emancipating narrative by performing a careful biopsy of Henry and removing him from the mechanisms of the main social organisms. The extraction of the protagonist in itself at least suggests a way towards a more liberated life. Though this path goes through devastation and annihilation, it holds the promise of an unshackled life. As Henry declares in his last moments, “[t]he only destruction with meaning […] is self-destruction. An even that is, […] questionable. […] It’s not about the people, it’s about the thing.”