Cloacal Obsession

My current audio book is The Religion by Tim Willocks, a big sprawling action/romance set in and around the siege of Malta in 1565. If you haven’t read it, you might think of it as a sort of overlarge Bernard Cornwell book with a better vocabulary and a wider fictional range. There’s a lot of larger-than-life handsome, big-shouldered swordsmen, beautiful, courageous ladies in gorgeous gowns, scheming Inquisitors, thick slabs of historical detail, epic battle scenes, and a rather astounding amount of piss and shit.

This book has a really high body count, and no one dies without voiding his bowels and/or bladder. I would have thought this a result of some kind of weird cloacal obsession on the part of the author, but I’ve read a lot of action fiction over the last few years that make a point of including this sort of detail, so it seems to be a feature of the genre.

And if it’s not bowels voiding, it’s bellies, with details descriptions of innards being pierced, spilled, toasted, fed to pigs, or whatever. A subspecies of action fiction that dotes on these sorts of descriptions has been called “war porn.”

Which I avoid, by the way.

There seems to be some kind of movement toward Xtreme Action Fiction, providing the same sort of gruesome detail that you get in the more graphic video games. Or worse.

I suspect it’s the sort of grim, realistic detail that authors who have never been in war themselves provide in order to show that they know their stuff.

May I just offer the suggestion that it’s time to stop with all the p. & s.? I asked Sage Walker, who in civilian life is an emergency-room MD, whether bowels and bladders void on receipt of traumatic injury, and she said not. (It might be different if you’re hanged, she said. She never worked on anyone who had been hanged.)

So now, if you’re reading one of these novels in which your chevalier is wading ankle deep in the doo-doo in order to smite his enemies, you can just sneer and mutter, “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

So there.