Absolute Zero Cool

by Declan Burke

ABC

Genres: Ireland, Mystery, Crime, Fiction, Irish Literature, Books About Books, Noir

Paperback

First published August 1, 2011

About the author

Declan Burke is the author of four novels: Eightball Boogie and Slaughter's Hound, both featuring the private eye Harry Rigby; Absolute Zero Cool; and The Big O.

Crime Always Pays, a comedy crime caper, will be published by Severn House in 2014.

He is also the editor of Down These Green Streets, a collection of essays, interviews and short fictions about the rise of Irish crime writing.

With John Connolly, he is the co-editor of Books To Die For, a collection of essays by the world's leading crime writers on the subject of their favourite crime novels and authors.

Eightball Boogie, Absolute Zero Cool and Slaughter's Hound were all shortlisted in the crime fiction category for the Irish Book Awards.

Absolute Zero Cool won the Goldsboro Last Laugh Award at Crimefest 2012.

Praise for Declan Burke:

“A fine writer at the top of his game.”
Lee Child.

“Prose both scabrous and poetic.”
Publishers Weekly.

“Proust meets Chandler over a pint of Guinness.” The Spectator.

“A sheer pleasure.” Tana French.

“A hardboiled delight.” The Guardian.

“Imagine Donald Westlake and Richard Stark collaborating on a screwball noir.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review).

“The effortless cool of Elmore Leonard at his peak.” Ray Banks.

“Among the most memorable books of the year, of any genre, was ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL.” Sunday Times.

“The writing is a joy.” Ken Bruen.

“A cross between Raymond Chandler and Flann O’Brien.” John Banville.

Reviews

[Kwoomac · Rating 5 out of 5]

First off, the author of the book is Declan Burke. His main character is Declan Burke, a writer, whose body of work is the same as the author's. Another character is Karlsson, a character in a novel written by character Declan Burke. Karlsson is also a writer and has written a book within the book by character Declan Burke. Karlsson shows up one day to Burke who is at a writer's retreat struggling with the final draft of a crime novel he's writing. Karlsson has reinvented himself as Billy, newly blond and three inches taller than Burke wrote him. The novel he appeared in, The Baby Killers, has languished on a shelf somewhere for five years, unpublished. Billy's life has been in limbo for these five years and he wants Burke to attempt a rewrite so they can get the book published by collaborating. Confused? No need, it's really a simple story of a writer's slippery slide toward madness.

I loved this whole idea of an author being tormented by a character. I've often wondered what happens to a character after I've finished a book. People often ask authors this very question, "Where are they now?" I've been known to drag out my reading of a story so I didn't have to say goodbye to a beloved character. So how does an author do this? How do they know when they are finished with a character and does the character stick with them, perhaps haunting them. (I've had the same thoughts about actors- do they absorb a little piece of every role they play?)

The writing is incredible and funny in a very quiet way. I found myself saying "well done" when Billy ripped off another clever quip.He was hysterical when he was messing with his bosses. Billy is really the focal point of the story and I found myself loving him and hating him at different times. There's a slow build to the inevitable climax. I wanted to fly toward the end of the story but I also wanted to linger on the words, which were so carefully wrought.

Norman Mailer said, "Every one of my books has killed me a little more." Author Declan Burke apparently agrees.

Speaking of haunting, here's Billy's favorite band:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loNU4f...

[Bill Kirton · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a previous review (of a Paul Auster novel), I wrote ‘Writing fiction about writing and writers is a precarious endeavour; making one of your characters yourself – giving him your name, location and profession – is provocative’. And the review went on to list the reasons why I won’t be reading any more of his work. So it’s strange that I found Absolute Zero Cool so compelling because it, too, features the writer himself, the work in progress (which is the novel we’re reading), one of its characters who ‘helps’ him to write it and works by blurring the dividing lines between fiction and reality.

But here that blurring is useful because it allows Burke to juxtapose, explore and exploit the elements of the creative process. When we write, we live with our characters, whether they’re contemporaries, historical, fantastical, aliens, anthropomorphised animals or whatever else our imaginations have conjured up. They exist for us, they’re real. So there’s no reason we shouldn’t enter into dialogues with them or suggest that they’re at least as legitimate (in terms of reality) as we ourselves are. And if that sounds pretentious or egocentric, consider this quote from the book ‘Writing and masturbation have in common temporary relief and the illusion of achievement’.

But I don’t want to stress the analytical aspects of the book or get tangled in the complexities of having two narrators, both fictional and yet one of them also the author himself, because this is also a bloody good thriller. It’s also funny, thought-provoking and very satisfying. Some reviews refer to it as possibly becoming a cult classic; I think it deserves to be more. It’s consciously set in a literary and philosophical tradition of which the writer is constantly aware and on which he draws. He’s an intelligent, sensitive novelist who’s comfortable with the form, willing to explore its wider possibilities and simultaneously a creator of great characters and an assured story-teller.

The two main threads – each having a male-female relationship and a child at its centre – develop in parallel and are linked by the identities of the 2 males, who are also the narrators. It’s only in the final action-packed pages that they’re brought thrillingly together and resolved in a fusion that made me at least want to start reading all over again. Throughout the book there’s a tension between the two central male characters, an unease about what one of them is planning, a series of choices about actions, any one of which could send the narrative in a different direction. It ticks all the boxes of a classic thriller.

And, at the same time, it’s just as thrilling in the way that it examines the process of writing itself. In the course of the story, Burke refers to ‘how writers are demented by their own egos’ and how their fictions are an ‘impossible pursuit’ which they convey through metaphors such as the whale in Moby Dick and, in this case, the destruction of a hospital. ‘A good novel and the terrorist bomb,’ writes Burke, ‘have this much in common: they are about questions, not answers’.

I won't go on. Read it. It gives you all this and more and, unlike the Paul Auster book, it’s immediate and entertaining. I’ll end with just one of the many examples of how good a writer Burke is which I noted as I read and which still keep me held by the book:

‘Democracy is a blizzard of options so thick it obscures the fact that there is no choice.’

Now That. Is. Good.

[John Gaynard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is the beginning of the review for this book on my blog:


Apart from the fact that it is a challenging, pleasing, provocative, wise-cracking read, there are at least three more reasons Declan Burke's most recent novel, Absolute Zero Cool, should be made obligatory reading for every innocent young student wishing to dedicate his or her life to any form of art, and who takes on the loan necessary to enroll in an institute of higher education, whether it be for acting, painting, sculpting or "creative writing". I will come back to the three reasons, towards the end of this review.

Below are a few paragraphs describing what the novel is about, from the main character's point of view.

You are the half-finished, perhaps never-to-be-finished, creation of a struggling crime writer. Even he has put you to one side, and forgotten you, and the only people who may still be aware of your existence are his former literary agent and an employee of the Irish Arts Council. Apart from the fact that he has left you in Limbo, you don't like the way the author, a man with a strong resemblance to Declan Burke, has created you. In fact, many, many elements of his discarded manuscript displease you.

He has given you a name, sometimes abbreviated to its first initial, that would be more at home in a novel written in German, in Prague, at the beginning of the 20th century, or in a normal, classical Swedish crime novel by somebody like Henning Mankell. In the Irish crime writer's hands you have become a hospital porter, selling candy bars to your elderly charges, cleaning their vomit up after them, and committing the occasional act of euthanasia. If you could have your own way, you'd probably ask the writer's agent to propose the manuscript to somebody like Mankell, or Arnaldur Indridason, to polish up your character in a conventional, Scandinavian crime, while giving you an Irish first name, and making you more of a hero than has this author, in whose judgement you have no confidence, and from whose jaded hands you have fallen into oblivion. However, you are destined to be the creature of this Burke-like writer, and the only hope you have of getting some self-respect is by preying on him until you can get him to bend his will to your own idea of a satisfactory plot. To achieve your objective, you are willing to push him to that level of psychological distress at which he will betray his own family's security in order to satisfy your ego.

The author, who may not really be who he thinks he is, finally gets the long awaited retreat, financed by the Irish Arts Council, that will give him the peace and quiet to finish a novel that may, at long last, encounter some financial success. His wife, who has made incredible self-sacrifice so that her man can practise his craft, sends him away content in the knowledge that he now has the space in which to come up with the goods. You, however, Bill, wait for the right moment, at the retreat, and then you appear to him, screwing up any possibility of his finishing the new novel before he has come to terms with you. You make threats, you ask him to rename you, you tell him you are worthy of a more noble crime than topping old people in distresss. He tells you he doesn't have the time to take care of you.

You work out a deal with the crime writer. You propose to rewrite a large part of the manuscript yourself, saying that this will ease the burden he has to carry. He knows better...

If you are interested, you can check out the rest of the review here:
http://johnjgaynard.blogspot.com/2011...

[Lance Charnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

We writers of fiction often talk about our characters as if they're real people. The characters talk to us; they misbehave when we try to make them do something they don't want to; they change the plot or do things that surprise us. Given the high incidence of neurosis among us ink-stained wretches, this isn't as alarming as it would be for, say, convenience-store clerks. But what if a character actually came alive... and had a bone to pick with the author?

That's the setup for Absolute Zero Cool, Declan Burke's fantasia on writing, health care, sociopathy and explosives.

There are two point-of-view characters: a thinly-disguised Declan Burke, writer of serio-comic Irish crime novels; and Billy, who also goes by Karlsson, a character in one of The Author's abandoned novels, who wants to reinvent himself and get the novel done so he can properly come alive. In that Billy has regular meetings with The Author and other people can see him, it would seem that he's quite alive enough, but never mind that. The Author gets involved in the project against his better instincts and finishes the story -- which happens to be about a sociopathic hospital porter who blows up his own hospital.

If you look up the definition of "meta" in Wiktionary, you'll find a picture of this novel's cover. The fictional Burke dishes on his own books, decries the state of modern publishing, and deals with a new child and an understandably skeptical wife. Billy decides he'd rather write part of his story himself, and does, trading editorial notes (more usually, barbs), with The Author. Karlsson (the version of Billy that The Author created and whom Billy wants to reform) is writing his own novel, Sermo Vulgis, which reads like Henry Miller on crack, and which Billy and The Author criticize. Somewhere in all of this there's a plot of sorts (Billy/Karlsson's plotting to demolish the hospital in the service of a constantly shifting portfolio of complaints and ideologies) that The Author and Billy also criticize; their changes end up in the parts of the novel that we follow as Billy's in-novel POV.

Does any of that make sense to you? If it does, are you ready for 238 pages of it? If so, here's your book. Enjoy.

If you stop trying to make sense of it all and just go with it, the story is pretty entertaining, even if it it does regularly threaten to become a literary ouroboros. Burke (both the real-world and in-book versions) has a mordant sense of humor and a gift for making even the oddest dialog sound real. You can hear the Irish lilt in the various narrative voices without descending into dialect. The character-as-a-real-person conceit is hardly unique (I can just imagine Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next popping up here) but Burke owns it. Billy becomes enough of a real person to help us forget he's a literary device, grounding that we certainly can use.

Why only four stars? This is a book that's easier to respect than to love; it's audacious, sure, but you'll never lose sight of the fact that Burke's screwing with you on every page. You probably won't come to like any of the characters. The crime plot regularly starts and stops as the characters take care of their postmodernist business. Karlsson's novel-within-a-novel-within-a-novel is strange and disturbing, but not in a way that adds much to his character; even Billy and The Author debate whether to take it out, but unfortunately never do. Finally, the two major female characters never advance much past being scolds and wet blankets.

Absolute Zero Cool is a tour de force literary experiment loosely wrapped in a genre cloak. If you like your narratives deconstructed and self-referential, you'll find much to enjoy here. If you're looking for a straight-ahead Celtic crime novel with a proper plot and characters, look elsewhere (perhaps to one of Burke's other novels).

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the funniest and freshest novels I've read in a while. I cannot remember a book I copied more lines from. And it's not just aphoristic. There's a bang-up plot happening, too. I'd never heard of Burke before but now I'll go back and read the other novels.

[Ray Nessly · Rating 5 out of 5]

A character in an unfinished novel rewrites his own story in this noir-ish, post-modern tale. Declan Burke is a unique and dazzling writer. I also very much liked Eightball Boogie.

[Malcolm Berry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now we are definitely moving into Gonzo-lit, where fictional characters threaten to blow up hospitals, authors happily bemoan their own calamities and successes with publishing within the fictive universe they have created, and nothing is as it seems. Or everything is as it seems, upside-down and ass-backwards, filtered through reverse mirrors and a sort of Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern pudding of terror and delight.

The simple fact is, there is so much room for the expansion of literature into new realms. Let us not be tied to what sells, what sexualizes, what mimics grocery store fiction!

Character/author/new dad Declan Burke's problem is that his character from a long-ago-shelved book has returned to haunt his next novel! Is this insane, or what? Well, certainly. But where has sanity got us over the past two hundred years of literature? Mostly to television and a dumbing down of our own creative expectations! [Not to disparage great modern fiction. It's out there. And some of it is certainly Irish.] So bring on the dark humor, the collision of hard social realism and inconceivable berzerkitude! Where can it lead us but further into the frantic rainbow of our unconscious!

[Seana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has been recently shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards. I'd thought to write a separate piece here, but since I haven't I will just copy and paste my review from my blog:

Having read two of his other books, I can attest that Mr. Burke is quite capable of writing a really good book in the more conventional forms, but that is not what he is setting out to do here. The conceit is that the character "Declan Burke" is visited, while on a writer's retreat, by a character who was thought up for a book that never made it to a final draft. Karlsson--or Billy, as he now apparently wants to be called-- asks to be let out of the limbo that is the fate of an unfinished character. He turns out to be a hard guy to say no to.



I believe I would have been a bit bewildered by this book, which I might have expected to be a caper, though of the darkly comic kind, if I had not been clued in by an early blurb of Adrian McKinty's, mentioning another Irishman who wrote sui generis fiction, Flann O'Brien. Having read O'Brien's The Third Policeman not that long ago myself, I was more prepared for the 'outside the crime fiction box' story than I might have been.

Although much of the book is about the hammering out of a novel between the fictional Karlsson and the, well, equally fictional Declan Burke, the book's dark energy is really Karlsson's, I think. He has a Mephistophelian charisma, if not what you could really call charm. When Karlsson, as Billy, meets Declan Burke at the writer's retreat, he is missing an eye, and sports an eyepatch. I was curious about that throughout the book, and may have missed a beat when it was explained, but an Irishman with an eyepatch always has some relation to Joyce, I suppose. For me, though, and this is just my own take on the thing, the one-eyed nature of Billy has everything to do with his monomania and, forgive the pun, lack of perspective. His relentlessly dark vision of our life on earth is persuasive, at times funny, and yet always bracing. He is the classic case of the guy who is too smart for his own good, by which I mean beyond the reach of help, because this is where he chooses to put himself.

The title of the book refers to the coldest possible temperature, which is more theoretical than actual, in which all energy is frozen. Nothing moves. This reminds me of Dante's version of hell, which is not heat, but ice. Karlsson, who want to bring everything down, is perhaps an agent of such a space, but Karlsson, much as he would like to go his own inexorable way, is, despite himself, still moved by love and loss, even as the book draws toward its close.

Karlsson is certainly an aspect of Declan Burke, for where else could he have come from? But Declan Burke, as either character or author, has learned a thing or two more about life, thanks to marriage and a child, than poor Karlsson ever dreamt of in his philosophies. Karlsson, I think, is aware of the lack.

Don't worry, Karlsson. You can always hope there will be a different sort of ending in the movie.

[Elizabeth A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

While at an artists’ retreat, our unnamed narrator, an author (is he or isn’t he Declan himself?), is visited by a man calling himself Billy Karlsson, which just happens to be the name of a character in one of the manuscripts the author has long since set aside. And while it’s all well and good that the author has moved on to a successful career writing comedic crime novels, Billy complains that he’s been stuck in limbo the past five years and would like very much to move the show along toward being published.

Not only that, Billy is no longer satisfied with his original incarnation and has some suggestions on which way his story should go. Bemused by this person who has taken on the persona of one of his characters, the author patiently explains that as a new father and somewhat successful author he’s in a much happier state of mind than he was when he initially drafted Billy’s dark tale of a hospital porter performing euthanasia on elderly patients, and as such isn’t really sure he can recapture that vibe… or that he wants to.

Billy’s persistent, however, and oddly charming, eventually convincing the author to get on board with the revisions. In fact, Billy offers to help things along by contributing more than just ideas, he’ll take over the rewrites of the ‘novel within the novel’ that his character was writing in the initial draft. And with that, Absolute Zero Cool starts a slow burn that ultimately builds to a literally explosive conclusion.

On the surface, the book offers the relatively straightforward, if unconventionally presented, stories of two men struggling to make sense of the women in their lives and to sort out whether the role of being a father – and the emotional and financial responsibility that comes with it – hinders unfettered creativity. Beneath the surface, however, Absolute Zero Cool represents a sneak peek inside the head of an artist fighting with his muse, struggling with the inherently conflicting impulses of humans to be both creative and destructive, and provides a devastating look at the stress and psychological demons which can result from such struggles.

If you’re looking for a book to casually read while waiting at the doctor’s office or to provide you an offhand chapter or two to page through before bed, well, stay the hell away from this book. It’s not a passive experience. Quite the contrary, Absolute Zero Cool is a novel that gives the reader no quarter, demanding that you keep up with the increasingly complex philosophical debates and psychological chess game occurring between the author and Billy, whose respective revisions to the text – and outlook on life – are clearly on a collision course. And when that collision occurs, it will leave you shaking your head (after you’ve cleaned up and reassembled the exploded bits) at Declan Burke’s mastery of language and storytelling skills.

Wickedly sharp, darkly humorous, uncommonly creative and brilliantly executed, Absolute Zero Cool is unquestionably absolutely cool.

[Buchdoktor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stellen Sie sich vor, Sie sind Autor und ihr Verlag sitzt Ihnen im Nacken, Sie möchten bitte endlich das zugesagte Buchmanuskript liefern. Einen Titel hat ihr Buch bereits, das seit Jahren auf seine Überarbeitung wartet.

So geht es dem zunächst namenlosen Autor in Declan Burkes selbstreflektierender Krimi-Satire. Die Grenzen zwischen Autor, Lektor und seiner Hauptfigur verschwimmen; der Autor befindet sich gleichzeitig in seiner Geschichte und außerhalb. Der Autor als Protagonist wirkt planlos, er versetzt seine Leser damit in dieselbe Situation. Warum sollte es Burkes Krimilesern besser gehen als ihm selbst? Kurzfristig könnte man sogar glauben, es mit zwei Icherzählern zu tun zu haben, bis Protagonist Billy Karlsson seinen lästigen Schöpfer aus der Handlung verdrängt und selbst die Macht übernimmt. Karlsson arbeitet als Hilfskraft in einem irischen Krankenhaus. Als Mitarbeiter auf der untersten Sprosse der Hackordnung transportiert er Waren, beseitigt Müll. Man nimmt ihn erst dann wahr, wenn der Müll nicht wie gewohnt abgeholt wird. Karlsson könnte an seinem Arbeitsplatz diverse Knüppel ins Getriebe des Betriebs werfen, weil er zu wenig Anerkennung bekommt.

Im Zwiegespräch mit seinem Autor mimt der Protagonist gern den Moralapostel. Er hält sich für eine Art Robin Hood des Gesundheitssystems, klaut, dealt, erpresst seinen Vorgesetzten und mischt sich in Dinge ein, die ihn nichts angehen. Mehrere ungeklärte Todesfälle soll es auf Stationen gegeben haben, zu denen Karlsson Zutritt hat. Auf mich hat Karlsson wie ein Unterhändler gewirkt, der aus seinem Autor möglichst viele Vorteile für sich herausschlagen will, während der zunehmend die Kontrolle über sein Kunstprodukt verliert. Schließlich erklärt Karlsson das Krankenhausgebäude zu seinem Feind, den es zu vernichten gilt. Nach meiner Interpretation katapultiert der Anschlag auf das Krankenhaus den Autor endgültig aus der fiktiven Handlung heraus, Karlsson übernimmt zukünftig seine Rolle.

In einem Unterhaltungsroman finde ich die Unsicherheit darüber zwar anstrengend, wer gerade wer ist, aber dennoch unterhaltsam.

[Rob Kitchin · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the jacket cover, John Banville states that Absolute Zero Cool is a cross between Flann O’Brien and Raymond Chandler. I think it’s more a cross between Flann O’Brien (the Irish satirist) and Declan Burke, author of Eight Ball Boogie, The Big O and Crime Always Pays – satire and high art meets screwball noir. The nearest comparison for the existential, literary plot-play I can think of is Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next and Nursery Crimes novels. Whereas Fforde plays with literary theory and intertextuality, Burke uses Greek mythology, theology and philosophy to deconstruct and satirise the life of a writer, the crime novel and contemporary society, especially the Irish health system. The result is a very clever book, that’s at once fun and challenging. The prose and plot has been honed within an inch of its life, full of lovely turns of phrases, philosophical depth and keen observational insight. I wouldn’t classify Absolute Zero Cool as a page turner – it’s far too cerebral for that – and the middle of the book is a little ponderous as various pieces are moved into place, but it does have a coherent plot that tugs the reader to the somewhat inevitable end. That’s no mean feat given how postmodern the tale is, but does reveal that the book is, as Burke insists in the text itself, a crime novel and not simply a literary conceit. Absolute Zero Cool takes the crime genre and its many tropes and stereotypes and throws them out the window. It’s a genuinely unique tale. It certainly won’t be for everybody, but for those crime readers who like to be pushed and challenged this is well worth a look.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

My initial review is as follows:

"I've read a lot about Declan Burke's being part of the vanguard of new Irish crime fiction. Perhaps that's true, but this didn't really do it for me.

Very clever, very stylish, but ultimately left me cold."

The author promptly left a very warm and funny comment, which caused a great sense of guilt at firing off a late-night, somewhat glib review. So here are some more thoughts.

The writing is really top-notch. There are three main points-of-view, and I could tell with the first sentence of each section which it was. I also liked that not everything was neatly wrapped up; the ambiguity throughout certainly kept my interest.

Ultimately, I think my problem with this book is that it felt more like a book of the head than a book of the heart. The cleverness seemed to be the point, rather than serving some greater point.

In the end, I did enjoy the book, and I will read more Burke soon.

[Colette Ni · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think he is one of the best Ireland has on offer right now. The man is so good it's hard to imagine how he can get better. Burke writes and reviews crime but this is a whole meal of a read and the tasty bites one savours leave a distinct 'wow! That's really absolute cool!' impression on the mind. A stop to pause and read back to fully explore what the man has just said. In a 'fan' mail I told him he was Jon Banville in reverse: Banville is an accalimed writer of cerebral fiction who writes his crime under the name of Benjamin Black. Burke writes crime but running threads of wit and wisdom in there tell the reader the man has far more going on in his intelligen head than just a crime plot. No formula rethreads here.

[Michael Bohli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Verwirrspiele, Täuschungen und die Mischung aus Fiktion und Realität beinhalten für mich bei Büchern eine grosse Anziehung. Bereits mit "Lunar Park" von Ellis liebte ich es, vom Autor hinters Licht geführt und im Regen stehen gelassen zu werden. Declan Burke wagt dasselbe bei "Absolute Zero Cool", scheitert leider etwas an der eigenen Cleverness.
Die Geschichte um Autor Burke, seinen unvollendete Roman und deren - scheinbar lebendigen - Hauptfigur Billy ist in Fragmenten aufgebaut, grossartig geschrieben uns wunderbar um sich in vielen Gedanken zu verlieren. Doch leider fehlt in der Geschichte etwas das Herz, die Monologe von Billy verfehlen somit oft ihr Ziel. Es blieb leider weniger haften, als ich mir bei einem solchen Roman erhoffe.

[Lisa]

So far, this is one weird book!

I couldn't do it. I just couldn't finish. I'm not going to rate it because that wouldn't be fair to the author/book. I'm just going to say I did not get into it and decided not to torture myself any longer. Too many books, too little time.

[Madeleine · Rating 3 out of 5]

A comment on the cover says it's a new take on noir...and it is. Not sure I was prepared for existentialism, nihilism, dark humor, and self deprecation via an author and hospital porter. Entertaining but not great literature.

[Charmaine Clancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very clever book that definitely allows the story to grow outside the normal constraints.

[Helena Stone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! I know I’ve said it before, but this is most definitely a book unlike any I’ve read in the past. I’m not even sure if I will be able to describe the plot in a way that makes sense to those who haven’t read the book, but I will try.

An author, on a retreat to finish a book he is working on finds himself confronted by Billy Karlsson, a character from a previous, unfinished novel. In that story Billy is a hospital porter who occasionally helps people who wish to die, but finds himself in trouble when his girlfriend finds out. For five years now Billy’s story has been on hold and as a result, so has Billy’s life.

Now Billy is taken things into his own hands. He has meetings with his creator, offers to write parts of the story himself and introduces a massive twist to the old plot. Just killing sick old people who wish to die isn’t enough anymore. A bigger statement is needed and therefore Billy plans to blow up the hospital where he works.

As the author and his character start to work together on reviving the old story the question is; can the creator stop his creation from inflicting death and destruction, or is he somehow complicit in the planned attack.

This is a truly original story. The lines between the stories told by the author and those narrated by his character become ever more blurred as the drama unfolds. Who is leading who? Who is the actual creator and who is the one following along? What is real, and what is fiction? All questions the reader is faced with, and for a very long time there don’t appear to be any clear cut answers.

All the blurbs about this book describe it as being “laugh-out-loud funny”, “full of the blackest humour” and “outrageously funny”. I however, didn’t get the humour in this book. I found the story to be original, disturbing, thought-provoking and inventive. I also think the book would make a wonderful subject for a book club discussion since there are so many angles to this story. I just don’t think my Dutch sense of humour was up to this Irish form of black comedy.

I was thoroughly impressed by the writing style though, the use of words and themes in this story and the way in which the author kept me hooked to a story I wasn’t entirely sure I liked.

All in all a very intriguing reading experience.

[Just This · Rating 3 out of 5]

self-reflexive metanovel / crime caper about Billy the hospital orderly & his creator

[Leigh Harrison · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a rare book for me. I knew halfway through it I wasn't going to enjoy it, yet I read it to the end. I didn't enjoy it and I wish I hadn't read it.

[Andrew Darling · Rating 5 out of 5]

First things first – this is a very fine piece of work indeed.
It is a novel about a man writing a novel about a man writing a novel.
It's also about Ireland and the EU, about bankers shafting us while
they pile up their bonuses, and about chatrooms and hospitals. John
Banville said it was a cross between Flann O’Brien and Raymond
Chandler, which is about right; there’s also an echo of Lawrence
Durrell, who pulled the same kind of trick about the relationship
between a writer and his creation in the Avignon Quintet (which I think
Mr Burke acknowledges at one point: ‘I’m no Lawrence Durrell,’ I say,
‘but I’m good enough to write you.’) Durrell didn’t do gags, though,
and this book is full of them – one-liners, paragraphs, even whole
passages, some of them very dark indeed. In this conversation, two of the book’s principal
characters discuss how Ireland might exploit the tourism potential of
two recent State visits by Queen Elizabeth II and President Obama:

I say, ‘Hey, how about this. We stick all the scumbags on an island,
say Inishbofin, all the paedophiles and bankers and Real IRA fuckers.’
‘Bertie Ahern,’ Cass murmurs, handing across the spliff.
‘Nice. So then we sell charter cruises to tourists, who sail around
the island all day lobbing rockets at them. Plus, we don’t give them
any food, so they’re eating one another. The scumbags, like, not the
tourists.’
‘We could film it,’ Cass says ‘sell the broadcast rights.’
In the end we decide we want Bertie shot with bullets of his own shite.

I am presently reading my way through the Nero Wolfe series, and
marvelling as I go that novels written up to 75 years ago can still
seem so fresh and smart. Absolute Zero Cool, though, shows just how
far the genre has travelled since Rex Stout and Raymond Chandler were
at work. Totally brilliant.

[Aine · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Y'know," Debs says, "it's just as well no one else can see what I can see. I'd hate for anyone to think my husband was a mentaller who needs to put in a couple of hours talking to his characters to get set up for the day".

Our narrator is writing his latest novel when he is interrupted by Billy Karlsson. Karlsson was a character in a previous novel that he left high and dry when he abandoned the book. Billy is a newer, more mellow incarnation of Karlsson. He needs the book to be finished so he can escape from the limbo of an unrealised existence so Billy promises an explosive ending if the book can be redrafted. He promises to carry out Karlsson’s threat, from the original novel, and blow up the hospital where he spends his days as a disillusioned porter. But graduating from euthanizing the odd elderly patient to blowing up an entire hospital involves a lot of hurdles.

There aren’t that many original novels around these days; Absolute Zero Cool subverts a genre. The author twists the perspective so that we are reading about the writing process as much as following the characters. The witty one-liners alone would make this book a must-read, but instead it is the dark, violent, intelligent plot that is so engrossing. This book has stayed in my system in the hours since I finished reading, but I think that was the intention.

[Andy Mckinney]

I have never read any other book like this before. To say that it is crime fiction doesn't really do it justice because when I think of that I think of a whodunit with a detective and this doesn't have that at all. To me this is more reminiscent of Fight Club and when you get to the ending you will see why I say that.

Basically you have an author who gets haunted by a story that he abandoned. Burke takes the idea that many writers talk about that their characters write the story to its literal logical outcome and poses questions about reality and freewill. There are some pretty biting comments about capitalism and loads of literary references. I found it hard work reading it in the way that a workout in a gym is hard work. This was like a mental cross trainer session. I had to pay attention but it was worth it. My copy was from my local library. I will probably get my own copy and reread it. This will be like a Sonny Rollins album, each time you engage with it you will get more attuned to it and get more from it. Maybe now I am ready for Infinte Jest, Gravity's Rainbow and Finnegan's Wake!

[Ctgt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is going to be very difficult for me to review. I wouldn't call it a crime novel in the usual sense, even though that's how it is categorized. There is quite a bit of humor and I found myself laughing out loud on several occasions. So, humor title? Not really. Mystery? Nope. Thriller? The pacing was nice, but not the traditional thriller breakneck speed. I guess it's in a category all it's own. I must say it's one of the few books where I have actually used the kindle to highlight passages for future reference. So why not a five star rating? I'm not a huge fan of the "Fight Club" method of storytelling.

[WortGestalt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Die Idee zum Plot ist ja wirklich fein und es wird in diesem Buch auch einiges Kluges und so manch Amüsantes erzählt, aber sooo innovativ wie erwartet war es für mich nicht, eher verliert sich der Autor in pseudo-philosophischen Gedanken über Herrschaftssinn, Macht und Zerstörung. Kann man spannend aufbereiten, ist hier aber nicht passiert. Sehr viel Geschwafel, das mich persönlich so gar nicht interessiert hat. Schade um die eigentlich tolle Story, die geht da unter. Zudem begeht der Autor in meinen Augen hier einen Super-GAU: Autoren, die sich ihre eigenen Bücher schreiben. Da bin ich raus.

[Chuk · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked some things about this book a lot, but it was a bit slow going for the first 80% or so. The prose is fine but there is a lot of what feels like literary wanking, even though it is kind of lampshaded. The end was good though. Can't really compare it to much else -- maybe King's The Dark Half? Some of the same themes, certainly. But King's book is more of a straightforward horror/thriller and I think his characters are better drawn.

[Diana Febry · Rating 4 out of 5]

TBH still thinking about what I think. It certainly made me think. The two main characters are the author and a character of an unfinished manuscript who isn't happy and insists the novel is completed. (I will come back and complete review at some point).

[Jon Steele · Rating 5 out of 5]

not satisfied with writing a user's manual for poor sods suffering from 'writer's block,' ABSOLUTE COOL ZERO is the best mind bending, weirdo-who dunnit (or who's going to do it) since phillip k dick's UBIK.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

post modern tale of author and one of his characters rewriting the character's story - a disenchanted hospital porter plans to blow up the hospital.
some deliberately provocative scenes in a style that had reminded me of Bukowski (and then he was name-checked)
well executed idea with some laughs

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am torn between recommending this to everyone I know and burning all evidence I read or enjoyed it to avoid being considered a lunatic. Dark, disturbing, entertaining. My library classified it as a mystery. Not exactly. Just weird and great. I loved it.