Review of Madness Is Better than Defeat by Ned Beauman

The opening scenes of the film Babylon are glorious madness. Sex, drugs, and rock n' roll at the height of the silent film era, it's the definition of a decadent, world-is-your-oyster, liberal frenzy. The sense of freedom is redolent. Taking those scenes and extrapolating upon them through variegated lenses is Ned Beauman's criminally underread Madness Is Better than Defeat (2018).

I generally provide a plot overview in my reviews, and I will attempt to do so here, as well. Just be aware the following is superficial, at best.

Madness Is Better than Defeat starts off as a quasi-competition between two groups of Westerners who come to learn of an undiscovered Mayan pyramid in the Honduran jungle circa the late 1930s. One group seeks to dismantle the pyramid and rebuild it in a museum, while the other seeks to make a Hollywood blockbuster using the pyramid as a set piece. A bee's hive viewed through facets of time, Beauman proceeds to tell the tales of the varying interests to the pyramid, their entourages, and the people whose orbits move in and out of the pyramid's fate. Madness, indeed.

Madness Is Better than Defeat is not for the feint of heart. Subtly, it's an ambitious novel, and perhaps longer than it needed to be. It continually shifts under eye, never letting the reader get comfortable before some meta-narrative elements stealthily sneaks in and provides the reader a new lens to view the story. Homage to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, meta-modern commentary, deconstructing modernist history—there are several ways the novel's crystal captures light.

There is therefore a certain, specific art to the making of Madness Is Better than Defeat. Gears within gears, temporal and atemporal, fever dream and waking reality—Beauman slips in and out of these modes from the perspectives of a healthy number of characters. It's a carousel of variable speeds and varying madnesses, all crafted in deceptively intentional prose. Readers who want direct, linear narratives should run screaming the other direction.

Likely, Madness Is Better than Defeat should have been a shorter novel. As stated, it's ambitious, with a lot to say between the lines. Beauman revels in maintaining a delicate tone that never overtly betrays the underlying insanity. Effort is put into ensuring the facade is not cheap nor disassociated with the various aforementioned themes and motifs. Due to the non-linear nature of the narrative, this can sometimes leave the reader feeling disconnected, a feeling more often felt as the page count lengthens. Cutting a good quarter of the novel would have let it punch at the weight it wants to.

In the end, Madness Is Better than Defeat is one of those novels that was published to zero if any fanfare but is deserving of greater recognition, particularly among more literary readers. It is a clear departure from Beauman's earlier, more genre-oriented efforts. It is a shapeshifter that cannot be quantified in easy, digestible fashion, but may be worth reading more about if the above sounds interesting.