Friday, Aug 29, 2008
Like a modern-day incarnation of Milton's Satan, Brady delivers a discourse that is twisted, self-serving and strangely persuasive. Quoting liberally from the likes of Dylan Thomas, Byron, Nietzsche, Sun Tzu and Buddha, Brady mocks what he regards as the rank mendacity of the status quo. Society's laws and morality derive from the ruling classes and their need to maintain their collective position at the pinnacle of the food chain, according to Brady. In his eyes, these assorted generals, politicians, lawyers and so on are just as rapacious and cruel as any serial killer. He asks:
How many centuries would you suppose it would take for freelance "criminals" and "madmen" to equal the numerical carnage the "law-abiding" and "sane" can achieve in such a comparatively short span of time? One should cultivate discrimination in accepting or respecting one's moral "superiors." So often they certainly are not.
Brady may be technically correct here, but with a few more Osama bin Ladens in the world, freelance psychopaths might one day even the score. This skewering of modern mores takes up the first half of the book, with the second half given over to a far more intriguing section wherein Brady examines the crimes of his fellow serial killers. Like a literary critic analyzing his favorite novels, Brady takes on the mantle of a murderous eminence grise -- a professorial Hannibal Lecter holding forth on the practitioners of his métier.
Speaking of Richard Ramirez, known as the "Night Stalker," Brady in fact compares serial killers to writers, as they both pursue "the quest for immortality" with serial killers using "a knife rather than a pen, skin rather than paper." He further states that "anything less a medium than human material" is no substitute for the "actual experience of writing on living and breathing pages." Considering Ramirez's delight in raping and humiliating his victims before consigning them to oblivion, this commentary is especially chilling.
Brady is quite clear that he regards a certain class of serial killers to be superior beings, gods by their own choice. For him, John Wayne Gacy was "the perfect psychopath." And Ted Bundy takes on the mantle of some bloody demiurge:
Life was too short to be restricted and deformed by the selfish designs of the already privileged. [Bundy] would thoroughly enjoy giving them a lesson in idiosyncratic "justice," and lead them on a dance worthy of Zarathustra, "lover of leaps and tangents," monster of divine laughter! A Dionysiac demon was rising from the abyss of his subconscious, eager to take flight, sink talons and teeth into living flesh, savor the blood, rip out the soul.
Brady wanted his book to be published under the pseudonym "Francois Villon," the renowned 15th century criminal/poet of France, but his publisher persuaded him to use his own name. Brady barely touches on his own crimes, and Feral House's Parfrey says Brady's solicitor has an autobiography under lock and key. One wonders if Brady is toying with us from his living grave at Ashworth, trying to whet the public's appetite for his life story, to be published on his death.
Certainly, Brady commands an audience. Something about the mournful poetry of the moors and the folie à deux between Brady and Hindley has snared the imaginations of many in Britain and out. Manchester-bred rock star Morrissey wrote a controversial Smiths song, "Suffer the Little Children," wherein Brady's victims call out from the grave, "Oh, find me ... find me, nothing more/We are on a sullen misty moor."
American novelist Peter Sotos makes incessant references to the case in his work, and on the cover of his book "Tick," there's a picture of Pat Hodges, a little girl Brady and Hindley enlisted to read newspaper accounts of the children they had "disappeared" into a tape recorder. Painter Marcus Harvey incurred the wrath of visitors to the much-maligned 1997 "Sensation" show in London with a portrait of Hindley that viewers pelted with eggs.
Brady's writings, as macabre and vengeful as they are, cannot be easily dismissed, even for those who find them repulsive and repugnant. They offer a unique moral lesson, a glimpse into the abyss of a damned soul as well as an illustration of the reductio ad absurdum of the moral relativism Brady espouses. In the end, that moral relativism is the slipperiest of ethical slopes, leading those who embrace it without hesitation to the sort of self-made hell in which Brady evidently now dwells.
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