By Crispin Rodrigues

catskull
Myle Yan Tay
Ethos Books (2023) / 472 pages / SGD 24

To combine the genres of noir and the coming-of-age novel together is an interesting pairing that is hardly ever done, but Myle Yan Tay's catskull puts forward an interesting hybrid of genres in a way that desires to speak about systemic ills of society through the transformation of protagonist Ram from mild-manner Peter Parker-esque junior college student to the deeply disturbed Daitya,  an anti-hero in the most anti-way possible. While I found the novel's hybridity the most ambitious part of the story, I felt that it also struggles greatly with the execution because of that same hybridity.

When we first meet protagonist Ram, he struggles with an all-too-familiar existential crisis – an impending A levels, an annoying brother, overbearing (but well-meaning) parents and a lack of sureness in what he wants to do in future. Tay does a marvellous job in creating a realistic world of the JC environment, replete with ah beng classmates and annoying teachers. It is this sterile environment that Ram and his best friend Kass grow up in, desiring some form of escapism. They stumble upon the titular catskull and after that, things begin to go downhill as Ram puts on the catskull as a symbolic representation of his confusion between what is ethically right and wrong by serving justice to those who he thinks deserve it, especially with violence. All at once am I drawn towards the proverbial superhero genre, perhaps not that of Superman or Wonder Woman, but the ones without powers but who are at peak physical conditioning like Batman or Daredevil. As someone who is trained in martial arts, Ram begins talking with his fists in the way he doles out justice instead of being the lawyer his parents desire him to be, representing the two sides of the same coin that is justice which he attempts to navigate.

But this is really where the similarities between the Daitya and Batman end. While Batman emphasises his 'no kill' policy because of his peak human condition, Ram does not learn that with great power comes great responsibility (I know this is from Spider-Man, but you get the gist). He wields a knife and a baseball bat with the delicate sensibility of a bull in a china shop and accidentally kills a few people, resulting in a really warped sense of justice. Ram becomes more Travis Bickle (from the 1976 film, Taxi Driver) than Peter Parker, a victim of a largely alienating society that refuses to relent in its harsh treatment on individuals, a neo-capitalist nightmare that haunts everyone. The bat he wields calls to mind his modus operandi – using blunt force trauma to dole out punishments on acts of injustice that are often swept under the rug.

What carries this novel is really the intertextuality between media as the novel relies on a steam-of-consciousness flitting among a personal recount, social media posts, text messages and action-packed sequence. One immediately calls to mind fiction that tries something similar, such as Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This, where the shifting interplay of text types creates a dreamlike state of paranoia, which really helps to build the atmosphere of the novel. When Ram puts on the catskull, there is a sense that he has entered a shamanistic view of the world, and that his present reality is but a mere state of fictive hallucination from there on. Ram is self-aware that he wishes to write his destiny as this heroic figure called the Daitya.

While I do enjoy the hybridity of genres, at times shifting between the noir-like minimalism of language and social media post's verbosity, I do struggle quite a fair bit to empathise with Ram. Perhaps coming from an older person's perspective (and the same thing can be said of many older readers who read young adult fiction), I find Ram's motives lacklustre, even childish at times. Rather than fighting for a noble cause from the start, he seems to run with fate in the way many young people yell YOLO before they do something hazardous, and it does make him seem more villainous than someone to root for. While there is much systemic malpractice that society can condemn an individual, it seems as if Ram rather enjoys such violent vigilantism rather than seeing it as a last resort. Perhaps this might be Tay's way of situating Ram as the victim of an unkind society, but when he kills Kass' father, even by accident, he comes across as a self-serving and childish character who is quite full of himself.

Kass is another character that I felt could do with a more nuanced treatment as she teams up with Ram in his vigilantism, in part because she is swept up with social media's depiction of the Daitya, but also in part because Ram kills her father. While her motivations are interesting, I did feel that her sense of loyalty to a (best) friend that just killed her father rather unconvincing without more complexity of emotions. Even her brother, Paris, seems to have more complexity than her.

Another aspect that I struggled with quite a bit was the unrelentingness of social issues in the novel, which at times felt more veered towards social commentary than wanting to really go in depth into the psyche of Ram. While many of these issues are pertinent, such as dealing with violence against family members, migrant workers and domestic employees, the treatment felt rather rushed and at times light, rather than giving these issues their due focus and dealing with them in a more nuanced manner entwined with the degradation of Ram's psyche. At times, I wished that there was more focus in dealing in just a single societal issue than a smorgasbord of societal ills, which would allow readers to grasp Ram's motivations better. In a way, this goes back to the ambition of the hybridity in the novel – how far can the author blur the lines between fiction and social criticism, and I felt that it lacks clarity in deciding one over the other.

Or perhaps this review is also a reflection of myself as part of a larger cog in an uncaring world, and I have put on the catskull, and have become numb to the almost-daily acts of violence, prejudice and microaggressions around me such that I lose the hope for a superhero, even one with twisted motivations like Ram/the Daitya. Perhaps he is not the hero we want, or even need, but the hero that has come about because of the debilitating circumstances that life throws at us.

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