Neverland: The Unreal Michael Jackson Story
Author: Simon Crump
Published by: Old Street Publishing

Michael Jackson is an almost unavoidable figure, thanks largely to 40 years of sometimes adulatory, often hostile, but always intrusive media attention. As is appropriate for the alleged last great icon of cultural consensus, you needn’t have taken an active interest in the man’s music to be cognisant of the major components of the MJ mythology: the abusive stage father; the prodigious song-and-dance skillz; the skin thing. Then there’s Neverland Ranch; child abuse accusations; Lisa Marie; the chimp. If his were a more conventional story, Jackson’s death would have been the final act. In the event it was merely the prelude to an ongoing, interminable saga. We will never, ever, hear the last of this guy.

Following Jackson’s death the publishing arm of the MJ industry began churning out titles ranging from the unsympathetic to the hagiographic, most emitting the soiled-linen stench of the cash-in. Doubtless the MJ phenomenon will eventually attract more considered, intelligent voices, in the same way that over the years a strand of quality Elvis commentary has emerged to counterbalance the reams of tripe dedicated to the King. For the moment, however, allow me to direct you to the irreverent, surreal and timely delights of Simon Crump’s Neverland.

“Timely” is an understatement. Crump claims that after three years of work he finished writing Neverland just hours before Jackson died. Thus what would have been an unusual, potentially libellous take on a living legend was given an added patina of relevance, not to mention poignance. Can’t have harmed the book’s sales, either.

Neverland is a sequel of sorts to Crump’s earlier My Elvis Blackout, a freewheeling collection of short prose pieces – “stories” is too limiting a term for the range of forms Crump employs – that is best described as a compendium of alternate-world Elvises: Elvis as serial killer, Elvis as celebrity chef, Elvis as subservient Yorkshire husband and scale-modelling enthusiast. In MEB Crump takes the broad outlines of the Elvis legend and does them over from several dozen angles. The book drips iconoclasm: this is not a book for the die-hard Elvis fan, unless said die-hard Elvis fan enjoys imagining Elvis slashing groupies with a swordstick or playing at bank robbers with Roy Orbison.

Neverland’s primary narrative uses Elvis as a springboard. (Not literally, although that certainly wouldn’t be out of place here.) Burly Texan Lamar, a member of Elvis’s Memphis Mafia, falls into a Rip Van Winkle-esque sleep following Presley’s death. Sixteen years later he wakes up and walks into a job as head of security for Elvis’s grown-up daughter and her “magical” husband, Michael.

Lamar’s anecdotes and observations provide a narrative arc (of sorts) that My Elvis Blackout eschewed. Life with the real Lisa and Michael was presumably different; down on the Neverland ranch things get really weird. Michael is depicted as a tragic innocent, desperately attempting to cushion himself against reality. In one story Lamar helps Michael purchase a “Genuine California Unicorn” from eBay; when it arrives the unicorn turns out to be a dead hamster with a golf tee stuck to its head. Lamar reports: “The kid’s eyes fill with tears. He slips his arm into mine. ‘This is even better than I expected, Lamar,’ he sobs. ‘It’s simply… magical.’”

The Lamar stories are interspersed with an array of narratives, some less than a page in length. Some of this material explicitly concerns Michael Jackson, usually through a distortion of time and/or place. Other pieces are only tenuously connected to MJ, or not at all, at least not in any interpretation this reader came up with.

Crump refuses to ground the book with a consistent form or perspective or even prose style. He fires off jokes both good and bad, constructs dialogue using verbiage ripped wholesale from the anodyne wastelands of Wikipedia, stages elaborate linguistic gags that aren’t funny and were probably never intended to be. This is uncompromising writing, constantly shifting beneath the reader’s feet, refusing to permit cheap interpretation or even sometimes basic comprehension.

That said, Neverland is loaded with incidental pleasures and it can be great fun watching Crump lay siege to the edifice of modern celebrity. Jackson is a pathetic figure – in Neverland as he was in Neverland – and Crump perfectly captures the absurdity of the man’s existence and the cynicism of those who fed off his celebrity. Early in the book an unidentified narrator reflects on Jackson’s career arc with chilling indifference: “For a while there was gold, lots of it, and there were cartoons and songs and dance and lunar walking and Motown and I want you back. We fixed him though. Then we fucked him. And we took it all.” Point well made, Mr Crump.