Love the Cover, Tolerate the Book: Matt Ruff's "Bad Monkeys"
Written: Oct 02 '09
Product Rating:
Pros: starts well
Cons: ends... not so well
The Bottom Line: Matt Ruff's Bad Monkeys may well be your cup of tea. It's not mine, but I still recognize it as pretty good (though fashionable) stuff.
The metaphor of a wheel within a wheel is far, far older than author Matt Ruff or even his muse, Philip K. Dick; which doesn't necessarily mean that Ruff can't pull off an extended version of multi-layered reality in his latest scifi... ummmm... thriller?, Bad Monkeys. Indeed, Ruff does a workmanlike job on the trope, though it's nowhere near the equal of Dick's classic novella, We Can remember it for You Wholesale. Though Dick's scifi thriller was reborn on the silver screen in 1990 as "Total Recall" (Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone), Ruff's stream-of-consciousness saga of Jane Charlotte's career as a member of The Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons of The Organization (known to Organization staff as "Bad Monkeys") is unlikely to excite the Hollywood studios - unless perhaps Jennifer Garner plays the female lead. But I digress.
Bad Monkeys is written in the form of transcripts of a series of interviews that take place in the psych ward of a Vegas hospital. It's where Jane Charlotte has been taken after her most recent "episode," which took place at a strip casino. Through a series of flashbacks; the thirty-something Jane recounts her recruitment, training, and brief career with The Organization - a shadowy high-tech version of God complete with a vast department ("Panopticon") devoted to monitoring ever-vigilant microscopic cameras printed on the eyes of photographs, posters, even on that weird pyramid on the back of a dollar bill. She spins tales of thwarting a serial killer at the tender age of fourteen with the help of "Catering" (Organization counterintelligence); of an embarrassing and downright disgusting "pet boys" period in her twenties and early thirties, of her recruitment at thirty-six, her training, her botched assignments, and her (sometimes partial) successes. What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a classic tale of good and evil. Good is The Organization, and Evil is The Troop - you know, like "troop of monkeys"- and Jane is on the side of good. We think...
Matt Ruff is author of Fool on the Hill and the snarkily-named public works trilogy, Sewer, Gas, and Electric (now there's my kind of trilogy...). Bad Monkeys, which is set in the present, uses numerous set pieces from scifi. These include super-secret organizations with fantasy technology; Matrix-like abilities to manipulate time and space (remember Neo and Trinity walking up walls and sidestepping bullets?); and complete realities constructed on a monster "stage," not unlike the holodecks on the various Star Trek vessels. In that sense, it's scifi - but, like most good scifi, Bad Monkeys is also a little morality play; in theory reinforcing a lesson that readers are supposed to internalize: something about Good is good and Evil is bad, which I suppose some people need to have reinforced frequently.
I wanted to like Bad Monkeys from the get-go, perhaps in part because of the book's whimsical design (it's presented in a format similar to a Guide Michelin; tall and thin with stiff, bright yellow leatherette covers; than a conventional paperback); in part I wanted to like it because it looked like fun. In fact, I started out liking the novel: Ruff has an engaging, dry wit; and the vignettes in Jane's first few interviews are both fun and inventive. However, as the interviews progress, Ruff's humor becomes darker (and less prevalent), as does the action. Whether it's the devolution of Jane's character in successive anecdotes, the progressively disturbing themes of her confessions, or the downward spiral of what seemed to be an uplifting little tale at the start, I don't know - suffice it to say that I came this close to not bothering to finish Bad Monkeys. I'm like that with a lot of recent literature by up-and-coming writers, who seem intent on embarrassing their readers instead of entertaining them.
I did finish it, however. On reflection I will freely admit that, while Ruff's little book is not really of a style that I prefer, it's pretty good. If Terry Pratchett, Harry Turtledove, and the ever-growing welter of vampire/supernatural romance/mystery/thrillers are your cup of tea, I suspect you'll like it just fine. Me, I'll stick to coffee...
Jane Charlotte claims to be a member of a secret organization--the Bad Monkeys--devoted to ridding the world of especially evil people. As Jane s tale...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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