WHAAM!

A topsy-turvy, kaleidoscopic journey through the 1960s by Australian-born writer John Gardiner.

The title of this tome–some 398 pages of stream-of-consciousness narrative–gets at its essential energy, which is raw, sinuous and colorful. Ostensibly, Gardiner follows a motley crew of characters through the chaos of the late ’60s, from the student free-speech movement to the anti-war protests, to the drugs, booze and colorful rock music that lent the decade its lush sonic backdrop. But this is not a history book or a memoir. In fact, it owes little to any traditional form of storytelling. Instead, the reader is dropped headfirst into a stew of sensory experiences, divided roughly by year into sections: 1968, 1969 and finally 1970, when the whole wild decade finally bowed its shaggy head. The language resembles, in some ways, the musical speak-sing of the Beats. The characters, with wonderfully theatrical names like Bridget Lovegrove and Christopher Featherstone, are always pushing at the edges of the world. They observe and interact at a rapidfire pace, describing sunsets, geometry and obscure religious theory with equal aplomb. For good measure, the author tosses in some plot pieces from “Paradise Lost” by John Milton and explores the minutiae of quantum physics, all while watching his set pieces swell and ebb under the force of his heavy academic language. The problem with WHAAM! is that there’s very little plot. Featherstone, for instance, drifts in and out of the chapters without much motivation. Readers never understand what he wants, where he came from or where exactly he’ll end up. Instead, a shapeless poeticism takes over, absorbing the characters and the book’s direction. Yet this shapelessness makes Gardiner’s book what it is–like the decade the author evokes, WHAAM! is endlessly colorful and wonderfully strange.

Students of yesteryear counterculture may claim this as their new favorite book.