Vanikin in the Underworld
A New Novel by Mark Gullick

1,525 words

Is it possible that one can be a dissident and still not be a dissident? That is, can one have dissidence thrust upon him for what he thinks rather than for what he feels? Academia is rife with people like this— those who naively believed in their own freedom of inquiry until they were canceled by corrupt elites who do not believe in freedom of inquiry. This is what happened to philosophy professor Harry Vanikin, and author Mark Gullick tells us his story in his new novel Vanikin in the Underworld.

The backstory is simple. Vanikin, the brilliant, popular professor, writes a scholarly tome which is about to skip off into oblivion like a stone upon the surface of a muddy creek when it suddenly runs afoul of a pinhead transexual university apparatchik who pans it and then incites the pitchfork-brandishing woke-brigade to ruin Vanikin’s life. “If Enoch Powell had translated Mein Kampf into Old Norse he would have got a milder write-up,” Gullick writes. Vanikin goes mad as a result—agoraphobic to be precise—and is deposited by his sister into a charmless apartment complex called Europa House where he curtains up the windows of his unit to guard against even the slightest intimation of sunlight. Gullick’s description of the place should give you a feel for this “underworld” to which Vanikin has been consigned.

Europa House was built at the start of the 1960s, and so has no exterior charm and resembles a hybrid of an East German tax office and a giant lock-up by a ring road. As mentioned, the original spacious apartments have been cordoned and sub-divided and partitioned to produce the current human henhouse, and I am merely one lonely occupant among many. A surprising proportion of the inhabitants are, by any reasonable usage of the phrase, clinically insane (I am one), but there are gems amid the chaos. Part sanctuary for the disenfranchised, part asylum, part dormitory, part ghost train, Europa House has been my abode these seven years since my public disgrace and defenestration. After the fall, this is my pandemonium.

Prose quality is one of the main characteristics of novels I assess when reviewing them, and the prose in Vanikin in the Underworld is as good as it gets. Truly, this is Vladimir Nabokov-tier writing, and, without even getting into the plot and the characters (which I will), it was a pure joy to read. The only writer in dissident circles approaching this level of literary mastery is Tito Purdue, except that Gullick conveys much less misanthropy and greater emotional dynamism. Sadness, cynicism, crankiness, elation, wit, hope, it’s all aswirl like pastel-flavored cotton candy in Vanikin’s tortured mind, and never is it not believable. Nor is Vanikin himself ever not believable as the reeling genius exile enslaved by his own temperamental psychosis and manifest over-qualifications who’s still unwilling to place his tenderized paw in front of him and begin his ascent back to the world of freedom and sunlight. Not that he would want to, given how the world of freedom and sunlight had not only unceremoniously heave-hoed him a from his office window overlooking the poli-sci department, but also defiled the scholar’s sacred truth until falsehoods became not just commonplace in his former university but compulsory. You see, Vanikin knows the score. He knows the outside world is marching “towards a second dark age, a sort of anti-Enlightenment.” He may not be bitter or vengeful about it, God bless him, but he knows.

Television is more of an education concerning the modern world than any course taught by my trendy former colleagues in the Sociology department of my university could ever bequeath to its students. What arch time-wasters these people are, their own time and the far more valuable time of their students. Media Studies. Non-white Studies. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies. Colonial Studies. Queer Studies. Beware any course in further education which has the word “studies” appended to it because studying is one of many standard academic procedures in which you will not be taking part. These hobbyist grudge farms have nothing to surprise you, no card up their respective sleeves, when you set them next to the television.

Vanikin also possesses vast erudition, which means he’s an OED Pez dispenser and never exhausts the historical, literary, and philosophical perspective through which he contextualizes the mundane goings on at Europa House. He’s also pretty funny.

Vanikin the wordsmith, the eloquent pedagogue, lecturer non pareil, writer of barely read yet banned books, is reduced to little stutterances in the presence of Magda, black-clad naiad of the corridors and upward-facing surfaces. That whereof we cannot speak, said the skinny neurotic queer Wittgenstein, we must remain silent. He never met Magda, who makes it impossible for Vanikin the philosopher to say anything coherent about anything, whether we can speak thereof or not. Thus I cannot offer her a coffee by anything more than deaf-mute gestures, coffee which she declines. Perhaps she limits herself to one cup a day of something prepared using Macbeth as a cookbook and not as it was intended.

I can quote this guy all day. And did anyone catch that oh-so-subtle homage to Keats? (Either that, or I’m dreaming.) Anyways, Vanikin in the Underworld wouldn’t even need a plot to keep me engrossed. Who cares about suspense and Syd Field’s precious paradigms, and wondering what’s going to happen next when those mythopoetic analogies just keep on comin’. This is how Gullick fleshes out his characters—not merely with trite, vulgar things like “descriptions,” but with deft classical references so inapt they venture close to perfect. This schtick is as is as old as Don Quixote, which means it is as old as the novel itself, except that Gullick, that lucky duck, had 400 more years of philosophy, history, and literature to pontificate upon than Cervantes did. I’m beginning to think that adjectives are for wimps. If this novel is 50,000 words, then 30,000 of them must have been earmarked for analogies like a toddler’s college fund, counting for inflation and all. Gullick must live by the Plutarchian adage, “Why write only one analogy when four will do?”

Think I’m kidding? Here you go.

Now, I am suddenly striding purposefully across the Athenian square to enlighten the populace, bring light where there is darkness, and generally act like Mwalimu Vanikin Tuan. At least I hope I am. There remains a dragon to slay, a ghost to placate and an internal mutiny to be put down, a nagging, jeering, prancing goblin that will not stop pulling on the hem of my jester’s silks.

Gullick occupies himself in the first third of his novel doing the Citizen Kane thing—going backwards then forwards then backwards then forwards—mostly for the sake of revelation (i.e., Vanikin’s backstory) and Europa House denizen development via ingenious analogy. We get to the first plot point on page 92, when Estrella, the gawky, long-faced, cardigan-wearing, 25-year-old wallflower tells our hero not to leave Europa House because the people there need him. This throws our hermetically sealed hermit for a loop. Why would they need him? Because he listens to them, the reader gathers. He invites them into his curtained broom closet of a living room and offers them tea and reflects upon their problems like Yoda with his 150 IQ and five decades of book learning and unfeigned empathy. Even during his most incisive moments, he still allows them their dignity—dignity which was wrenched from him so pitilessly on the day he was cast into the underworld like John Milton’s Mulciber, “one of Satan’s angels pushed (by Michael, if memory is a good and faithful servant) over heaven’s battlements to fall to earth in a leafy forest, a descent which took a full day.”

The second plot point occurs two pages later (I know, it’s a real thrill-a-minute) when Vanikin determines for various abstruse philosophical reasons he must acquire a clock. And that’s it. Starting with these baby steps we soon witness a productive collaboration between Vanikin and Estrella, which could possibly lead to the poor man’s redemption and return to the world of the living . . . or not. That’s the plot. That’s the suspense. And you know what? That’s plenty. Gullick even treats us to a nifty twist in the end. And it all works. It’s a rare thing in a novel when everything works.

Perhaps the most valuable thing about Vanikin in the Underworld is how it is red-pilled without trying to red-pill anyone. Mark Gullick presents reality as a given, as it is in real life, despite how our elites today try to warp it. He does not stoop to prove race- or gender-realism, nor does he profess tribal identity or rail against the Jews, which unfortunately seems to be the point of many novels written by dissidents. Instead, he tells a universal story that’s as old as Socrates—a man suffers a fall from grace by running afoul of his corrupt elites, and has to claw his way back up from the underworld in hopes that one day he can again soar to the heavens like Daedalus.

Indeed, no one does it better.

You can purchase Vanikin in the Underworld here.