koilungfish | Only Death Is Real by Tom Gabriel Fischer

Title - Only Death Is Real

Author - Tom Gabriel Fischer

ISBN - 978 0 9796163 9 6

“A part of my daily life ever since Grave Hill began playing at the bunker, this continual pilgrimage on unpaved paths underneath the looming, dark trees, underlined by the smell of the damp, moss-covered forest earth and the algae-infested water in the ravine’s two creeks, served to elevate the mission of creating new music into near mythical proportions for me. Once back home late at night, I often waited for storms and rain and then donned helmet, shield, and sword to hike across the fields and through the forests in the dark for hours.”

Only Death Is Real is the biography of the bands Hellhammer and Celtic Frost as told by their only beginning-to-end member. It’s important to hold this in mind since said member, Tom Gabriel Fischer, better known to the world as Tom Warrior, could easily have turned the book into a slice of autobiography and didn’t. From some of the reactions to this book when it came out in 2009, one might have expected that it would be a colossal whine-fest with a self-aggrandising tilt. It isn’t. It is indeed worth some mention that there are many, many points at which Warrior could have chosen to bang on about something - his horrific upbringing [the curt summaries of which leave one wondering where in the seven hells the Swiss social services were], the amount of violence the members of Hellhammer were subject to over the course of the band’s existence, how Hellhammer preceded the black metal bands of the 90s in vision and visuals, issues with record labels over finance and recording, issues with parents, jobs and haircuts - and chooses not. Although Warrior’s point of view holds centre throughout the book, it’s hard to fault that; he’s the only person who was there for the entire duration of the events.

I don’t generally go into reviewing a book as a physical object, but in this instance it’s relevant. Not just because Only Death Is Real is illustrated with a great sheaf of photos, band logos, fliers and other material, but also because the book as an object is a form of communication in and of itself. Only Death Is Real is printed on the same glossy yet slightly coarse paper one finds in album liner notes, the kind that creases at the slightest provocation, and takes fingerprints better than police lifting tape, meaning you have to turn the pages by their edges or permanently mark them with your presence. The pages are printed white-on-black, which presents no difficulty to reading but reinforces the extreme metal liner note feel. Only Death Is Real is also remarkably heavy for its size and shape, and the corners feel sharper than they ought. This book, if dropped on the foot, will bruise and may well also draw blood, and this feels entirely appropriate.

Only Death Is Real as a physical object is dark, prickly, unwilling to forget that you touched it, uncompromisingly difficult to hold and hard on not just the wrists but the elbows too. It is too heavy to be held in a standard reading position but too narrow in the spine to lay flat, too deep to hold in the lap, too sharp to rest on the thigh and too glossy to be read one-handed. You cannot read this sitting cross-legged. You cannot read this lying down. You cannot read this sitting comfortably. This book is going to extract a tithe of discomfort if not pain if you want to get through it, and this is, again, entirely appropriate for the book and its contents. It’s a form of immersion in and communication of a small portion of the discomfort, frustration and restlessness of the members of Hellhammer, the author in particular, that may not be intentional but works damn well.

Which leads to why one would want to go through with this rather awkward effort. Warrior’s writing is glass-smooth and fluidly easy to read. I started this book having been awake all night and read halfway through before my brain shut down. I literally only stopped when I could no longer make sentences out of words. Given that Only Death Is Real is the first book I’ve read cover-to-cover in something like three years [the last one was Andrew Robinson’s Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts, a thicker book than this yet somehow far less heavy] not only being enticed into turning page after page but also doing so without realising that one is doing so, without noticing that one has been reading for hours despite having to stop to shake the cramp out of your wrists every now and then, really is testament to just how good Warrior’s writing is. Given how badly some people whose first language is English write, having someone who is writing in their third language [I believe] outclass them for style and ability really puts some writers in their place.

This is not to say Warrior’s prose is flawless. He has a limited number of tones, which he employs to their fullest, but the sombre, serious dignity that is probably a reflection of the author’s personality is not going to leave at any point. Anyone looking for recollections of exciting things done with illicit substances and adventurous women in the back of a van is reading the wrong book. Warrior’s style leans to the formal without being stiff, and cuts a fine balance between colloquial fluidity and precision eloquence without getting unnecessarily sesquipedalian. Considering that Warrior is a career musician and, as the more gifted musicians tend to be, also a visual artist, the fact that he’s using his third medium [he also maintains a personal blog if you want a greater sample of his writing style] as well as his third language [I think] here puts a lot of native English-speaking professional writers to real shame. Some might argue that Warrior’s a professional communicator with more than thirty years of experience in expressing his thoughts and feeling backing his pen, and some might argue that he’s reckoned by some to be genius loci of the extreme metal scene, and some might indeed call his style pretentious or over-sensitive, but sometimes you just have to cut down to the core: this is good writing, the correct balance of technical expertise and artistic sensitivity. Warrior uses the right word to say what he means, where and when he means it, but constructs his text so that his higher-end word choices don’t overburden his narrative flow.

This leaves only the general spirit of the book to comment on. It is, as said, sombre, a mixture of pride and pain which is underlined by the picture content. There is an overall sensitivity to mood, to setting, to artistry that pervades the whole book, and one cannot be sensitive to the world without getting hurt by it. The same photos that map the maturation of Tom Fischer through Satanic Slaughter into Tom Warrior also describe the hardening of a mistrustful stare and the sad death of a disarming smile.

This book is:
* - contemplative

* - surprisingly easy to read
* - a complete package

This book is not:

* - to be read comfortably
* - to be read lightly
* - light