Il-Manifest tal-Killer
by Karl Schembri
Xjuħ u żgħażagħ, kbar u tfal
Ejja nħarrbu l-annimal!
Arrestaw ’il dak il-bagħal,
Ejja nħarrbu l-annimal!
Maltese author’s Karl Schembri’s Il-Manifest tal-Killer was first published in 2006, quickly achieving a succès de scandale. A proposed broadcast of the novel on the University of Malta’s radio (Campus FM) was banned, supposedly for the novel’s “controversial” nature (albeit most likely for its liberal use of swearwords), and it was described at the time as an “explosive” document. The edition which I read is the 2020 reissue by Merlin Publishers.
The eponymous killer is an anonymous agitator with an online website and forum (this was before the ubiquity of Facebook and other social media), who is held up as a hero and model by rebels against the conservative Maltese establishment. When an animal circus visits Malta, a group of anarchic Junior College students and older hangers-on, motivated by the Killer’s call to “release the animal”, gather to protest against the circus. Someone takes the Killer’s message literally, freeing one of the tigers of the circus, which ends up prancing obliviously along the main roads of Malta. As the Police try to locate the elusive beast, and the even more elusive Killer, the students hatch a plan to take over the media and subvert the establishment, a plan which involves the hijacking of that most bourgeois of local institutions, the Malta Eurovision Song Contest.
Schembri’s novel is mordant, witty and often hilarious, sparing no punches in its criticism of the (largely conservative) bastions of Maltese society – politicians, big business, the Police, the media and the Curia. Its heroes are the idealistic (if often naïve) young students who dream of a freer, fairer world, as well as the downtrodden, such as watchman Mario Brincat, who turns out to be much more articulate and intelligent than he originally lets on. The use of the vernacular, including frequent profanities, is a statement against the stringent censorship which held sway when the novel was written. Its postmodern style (incorporating emails, forum posts, teleshopping transcripts and newspaper interviews alongside “learned” references to Marx, Bakunin and Foucault) reflects contemporary literary approaches whilst serving as an “anti-literary” statement in its adoption of “popular” means of expression.
More
than fifteen years on, we live in a society which is much more liberal, where
laws on censorship are much more permissive and in which the weed-fuelled
antics of the anarchical students would likely be looked upon more benignly (the
use of recreational cannabis has just been made legal in Malta). You might think that this renders Schembri’s
novel dated and irrelevant but, unfortunately, it’s not. Its angry criticism of a politically polarised
society, of the links between big business and politics, and of rampant
development, still strikes a raw nerve.
Il-Manifest tal-Killer is enjoyable, funny and (still) topical, but, ultimately, an imperfect book. The circus protest which kicks off the story and the striking metaphor of the “freed beast” are quickly abandoned in favour of the “Eurovision” strand, leading to a rather narratively lopsided plot. The chatty, omniscient, third-person narrator (whose identity we learn at the end) is initially likable but then becomes rather intrusive and wearisome. Also, for an “anarchic” novel, the book unexpectedly slides into sentimentality which I didn’t particularly mind, but which seems to jar in a supposedly subversive novel. My greatest disappointment with this novel is that it perhaps buckles under the weight of expectation. The very media machine lampooned in the novel, advertised this latest edition of Il-Manifest tal-Killer as a reissue of a “cult novel”, a “banned” text. A brief study by Mario Azzopardi, written for the original publication and reproduced as an afterword in this 2020 edition, positions the novel within a long-standing tradition of Maltese protest literature, spanning from Ġwann Mamo and Manoel Dimech to the present day via the 60s avantgarde, while anointing it as the very first “strictly anarchic novel exploring the local collective sensibility”. Yes, Il-Manifest tal-Killer is good, but I’m not sure it’s substantial enough to bear the burden of history.
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