review of
John Boyd's The Organ Bank Farm
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 12, 2012

Hhmm..... I've always admired J.G.Ballard as a pioneer of a particular insight into the psychopathology of contemporary society. In particular, The Atrocity Exhibition (copyrighted in 1969 & 1st published in 1970) & Crash (1973). I even used text from the former in a movie of mine called EYE-TRACKING (1988).

Of course, the more one reads or experiences culture in general, the less likely it is that any given figure will stand out as a 'lone genius' - there're bound to be comparable figures. That brings me to The Organ Bank Farm (1970) by John Boyd. Written around the same time as Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, it's not as experimentally written but it still has a hard-edged medical POV to it that's reminiscent of Ballard. Perhaps if I were in the habit of reading medical thrillers, like those of Robin Cook, Boyd & Ballard wd seem less like isolated figures. That sd, Cook started writing after both these guys so they're still progenitors of some sort to me.

The thing, perhaps, that Ballard & Boyd seem to have most in common is their mutual psychopathfinding position (as I call it). Both seem to be writing from a place of intense personal experience as applied to very contemporary problems.

Boyd immediately got my attn by writing on p2:

"Mild anarchy reigned. The government printed edicts, which good citizens read before ignoring. Crimes against property ceased, against persons diminished."

In other words, instead of using "anarchy" in the usual hostile cliché way to indicate that an absence of 'effectual' governing increased violence & chaos, Boyd uses it to indicate a more benign condition.

In general, the writing is very sharp, making me think that Boyd himself must've been very sharp too. This sharpness cd be indicative of a type of psychopathia, a fierce clarity. The main character, Dr. James Galway, has kindly & considerate motives at the same time that he's astonishingly ruthless in methods that he uses. His initial 'examination' of the nurse assigned to him includes telling her to undress & then fucking her. His healing methods are, as the cliché goes, 'unconventional' - but effective. He "belong[s] to no school", as he states at one hearing, but leans toward a combination of radical psychotherapy & behaviorism. I suspect that Boyd was well-read on such subjects at the time of writing this.

Touches that indicate more than passing familiarity w/ the grimmer side of the human mind include such things as having one of the secretaries be a CIA plant using the cover name of "Elsie Cook", a barely concealed Anglicization of "Ilse Koch" - the so-called "She-Wolf of the SS" (as the exploitation film title has it) - notorious for her abuses at the Belsen concentration camp. Then there're statements like: "He assumed the girl was a prostitute because of her languor, false eyelashes, and a cross worn around her neck." When I see a cross worn around someone's neck & learn that they were raised Catholic, I wonder if they're into S&M & B&D.

In fact, the most homicidal character is also religious & favors necrophilia. During an arm-wrestling match, she uses Latin prayers to boost her strength. Galway, an almost inhumanly astute judge of character, uses his observations of her necrophiliac desires to seduce her in the morgue. His ulterior motives use means that might be considered in contradiction to their ends.

Ultimately, Galway is being exploited himself for his skill as a neurosurgeon. The goal? Brain transplants. How much Boyd researched to try to make this seem technically feasible I don't know but it didn't quite work for me. Still, the surgery made for a nice thriller detail.

Even more interestingly, for me, was Dr. Lovestone's use of music for healing. Lovestone wd record brain signals & turn them into compositions intended to be played back to the patient to reinforce desirable characteristics. I wonder whether Boyd was familiar w/ the music produced by Alvin Lucier ("Music for Solo Performer (for Highly Amplified Brainwaves)" - 1964-'65), or MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva - Richard Teitelbaum, a member, used "organic control signals such as: voice, heartbeats, brainwaves, skin-resistance variations" according to the liner notes of their 1970 LP). David Rosenboom's 1977 "On Being Invisible" wd've come later but I mention it anyway to show that such experiments continued on.

While some aspects of Boyd's version of this brain-signal-inspired music were of interest to me, Boyd's limited understanding of contemporary music showed in his reduction of the music to program music, a rather unimaginative possibility.

All in all, the plot of this was compelling for me but the initial promise of a Ballard-like insightfulness deteriorated a little into a Cook-like medical thriller. I'll read more by Boyd if I can find it but I might write him off after another novel if greater sophistication isn't evident. ( )