TITLE: Candy
AUTHOR: Luke Davies
GENRE: General Fiction or Memoir
PUBLISHED: June 16, 1998
RATING: ★★★★★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon.com
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism
Description: "Candy is beside me, drenched in sweat. She's breathing gently, long slow breaths. I imagine her soul going in and out: wanting to leave, wanting to come back, wanting to leave, wanting to come back. The day will soon harden into what we need to do. But for now we have each other. . . ."
He met Candy amid a lush Sydney summer. Gorgeous, sexy, free-spirited Candy. They fell in love fast, lots of laughter and lust, the days melting warmly into each other. He never planned to give her a habit. But she wanted a taste. And wasn't love, after all, about sharing lives? Candy had a bit of money and in the beginning, everything was beautiful. Heady, heroin-hazed days, the world open and inviting. But when the money ran out, the craving remained, and the days ceased their luxurious stretch.
But there was still love. Only now, it was a threesome. Heroin had its own demands, its own timetable, and thoughts of nabbing the next fix hurled them into each day. Then, when desperation sets in, Candy will stop at nothing to secure a blast, as she and her lover become hostage to the nightmarish world of addiction.
Painful, sexy, tender, and charged with dark humor, Candy provocatively charts the daily rituals of two lovers maintaining a long-term junk habit. Told in stunningly vivid prose and set against the backdrop of suburban and urban Australia, Candy is both an electrifying and frightening glimpse of contemporary life and love.
Review: I still remember the day I came across this paperback in 1998, the cover was bright green with a rusty spoon - quite startling. I had seen the movie Trainspotting a few years before and heroin chic was in vogue; so I picked up the book, utterly fascinated. I sat right down and started reading about the protagonist, Dan, and his girlfriend (later wife), Candy. I'd never been to Australia, I'd never used heroin, but in just a few pages, I felt I knew these characters.
The book begins with the early days of the relationship between Candy and Dan, takes us through brothels, addiction, manufacturing and selling heroin, many attempts at withdrawal, marriage, pregnancies, mental illness, family drama, and even the everyday minutiae of their lives; all fascinating. Their bad days become more frequent, but are described beautifully in the novel...
"My day in the light, the day is darkening. I'm hurling all the little joys against the greater sadness. The sadness is a giant weight. It presses down. Its meaning: "What's the point?" The little joys are pebbles. The pebbles are getting smaller and smaller and the weight of the sadness is growing, the sadness is gaining density and mass, until in the end I'm throwing handfuls of dust at matter so thick there's no space between the molecules. Nowhere anywhere for anything to move. The years roll on."
Davies can even find poetry and beauty in heroin withdrawal and addiction...
“I can no longer cry. I groan a few times. Through the slits that are my eyes, I stare at my shoes, at the gray swirls of the concrete floor, at the bright orange lid of my syringe. And I realize—it’s a kind of horror—that this is my life.
And I can’t stop. I just can’t stop. I can't stop anymore.”
Like a lot of my favorite fiction novels, it turns out that this novel is based on real life events. Luke Davies has written two other novels but I couldn't get through either of them. What makes this novel different is that Davies writes with such passion, beauty, truth, and simplicity; he writes about what he knows, which is why it works. From my first read, I felt that Davies' way of describing his all-consuming, selfish, bright hot lust for the drug is so realistic that it cannot be merely fiction.
When Candy was made into a film (2006), Davies admitted what I felt was true from the beginning; the novel is based on his experiences as a heroin addict in the 1980s, set in Sydney and Melbourne, the "worst years" being 1984 to 1990. Soon after, Melbourne painter Megan Bannister was identified as the woman portrayed as Candy in the novel. She and Davies were married for six years during the 1980s and confirms that key events in the novel are true.
I have reread this novel dozens of times. Writing this review, I yearn to read it again. I think most of its appeal for me is that the protagonist and his girlfriend, Candy, are not only appallingly, achingly real, withdrawals and all, but both of them are so likable. Other characters drift through - and we get to know, love, and sometimes lose - all of them as well. I love this book so much that after I first read it, I developed a fascination with addicts, in particular heroin addicts, and I read many other memoirs and drug-related fiction trying to get the same satisfaction I found in Candy. Apart from perhaps William Burrough's novel, Junky(a very different type of drug memoir), Candy is far above any other such book I have read. Part of the beauty of this novel is the gorgeous writing - Luke Davies is an Australian poet, with five books of poetry; he has won several awards and medals. I will leave you with an example of the beautiful writing here, as Dan speaks to you toward the end of the novel...
You just leak away. And if you're lucky, then one night in the silence, in the deep heart of the dark, you'll hear the distant trickling of the blood in your veins. A weary world of rivers, hauling their pain through the dark heat. The heart like a tom-tom, beating the message that time is running out. You'll lie there strangely alert. You'll actually feel the inside of your body, which is your soul, or where your soul is, and a great sadness will engulf you. And from the sadness an itch might begin, the itch of desire for change.
I feel anyone who appreciates good writing, especially poetry, would love this novel. If you also love reading about gritty situations, edgy people on the fringes of society, and adore junkie memoirs, all the better. Five stars.
P.S. If you do read the novel, and love it like I did you might want to learn what happened to the real Dan and Candy. Luke Davies is still a writer, a poet, and just like his character has been off heroin since splitting up with his wife. Megan Bannister is an Australian artist, she states she is now clean and sober.
