The land of laughs by Jonathon Carroll was a Christmas gift off a friend. So let me begin with……. sorry Tom, I didn’t dig it.

Thomas Abbey is the wealthy son of a fifties Hollywood superstar actor, and a disillusioned teacher. Thomas has decided that he requires a break from teaching, and is trying to decide on something to do as a sabbatical. His other interests include collecting ceremonial masks, and reading and collecting the books of the late children’s author, Marshall France. When he stumbles across another avid France fan in a second hand bookshop, he and she strike up a quirky friendship, and together begin to research Frances life with a goal to produces a definitive biography of the enigmatic author.

“She” is Saxony Gardner, an eccentric and introvert young woman, who collects and makes marionettes in her spare time. Saxony turns out to be a whiz in the task of research however, and quickly begins to compiles huge amounts of information about Frances life.

France was a recluse by all accounts, and after changing his name on a romantic whim as a child, he came to America, and after working as a mortuary attendant for some years, he finally settled in Galen Missouri, where he wrote the remarkable children’s books for which he became duly famous. Frances books were peopled with colorful and unusual characters…. such as Krang…a living kite, towed around endlessly by an English bull terrier which is its best friend. Frances books are full of wonderful analogies and everybody who reads them seems able to find in them elements of their own experience. There are no ordinary people in Frances books, and as Saxony and Thomas research him, they discover that there were few normal people in his life either. His daughter Anna, they learn from France’s editor, was psychotic. She is currently the only person who can authorize a biography, and the researchers see that they will have to confront her in Galen, where she still resides to solve the riddles of France’s life.

So off to Galen they go, by this time having fallen in love. Where things are not as expected…. especially Anna. Anna is the friendliest face in Galen, she immediately helps the two get settled with somewhere to stay, and invites them over to talk her about her father and discuss their work. Pleased but surprised, they dine with Anna, and find France’s home to be an eccentric as his work was, full of oddities, and strange eclectic collections of memorabilia. Even the place settings are eccentric…. Thomas finds his fork in the shape of a clown, his knife a long muscled arm holding a paddle of some kind. You get the picture I think. Anna reveals that she has been waiting for a biographer who loved her father, which none of the previous ones did. She seems open, but clearly lies frequently about the details of her fathers life. They come to wonder what she and the rest of Galen might be hiding.

And then the strange things begin to happen…a car hits a boy, and the inhabitants of the town are more concerned that “the wrong person” hit him, than they are for the death of the boy. On a visit to the home of a newfound friend, the friends wife for a moment changes into Krang, and then changes back before Thomas’s eyes. Saxony discovers that France took all the names for human characters in his books from the Galen cemetery.

Creepy and peculiar, huh?

Things start to turn nasty for Thomas and Saxony. The previously friendly townsfolk become aggressive and rude. Anna tells Thomas that Saxony is going to have to leave town soon, and when Thomas gets the explanation, he actually helps to make it happen…. Anna has decided to let him do the biography. It seems Marshall France had foretold his coming. But Saxony is not part of the plot.

And that’s not all he foretold.

It turns out, Marshall France foretold the entire current set of happenings in Galen. His writings have been coming true in Galen for years now, since long before his death. France knew this, and used his magical talent to write the life stories of the town’s inhabitants. They don’t even seem to mind this. If France wrote that they died of cancer when they were ninety years old, then they could smoke fifty cigarettes a day for life if they wished with complete disregard for the consequences, as nothing could possibly afflict them that France had not written. To the inhabitants of Galen, this kind of security and peace of mind is worth the small price of knowing that someone else wrote your life story for you.

But all has not been going well in Galen. The accidental death of the young boy was expected, but when it happened, the person that France had foretold did not perpetrate it. A woman has a new baby, but it is the wrong sex…. Marshall France’s magic is fading, and only his magical biographer can bring him back…. literally. Thomas Abbey is to end his biography by stating that the death of Marshall France was a hoax, and the final scene is to be France arriving back in Galen, to carry on right where he left off.

As you might imagine, this all comes as quite a shock.

Will the secret of Galen be revealed to the world? Will Marshall France be magically resurrected, as he himself predicted? Can Saxony and Thomas escape from this town at any point now that they know so much? Well, you have to read it and see.

So much for the plot. Let’s move on to how it reads.

First things first, this book has a BAD back cover. I quote..

“… something fantastic and horrible is happening. The magic of Marshall France has extended far beyond the printed page. leaving them with a terrifying task to undertake.”

You see the problem I’m sure. This book gives anyone with even the remotest familiarity with the fantasy genre all the information they need to see where this story is going to go. It is equally disappointing that the plot is so thin that the back cover has essentially left you with no revelations to find at the end of the book. This is a one-ring circus. A one-trick-dog. A pretty lame tale to bother re-telling.

And I do mean re-telling…..you are not going to find this fresh if you have more than even a passing familiarity with Stephen King. Or the movie “The Wicker Man”.
Or Lewis Carroll….the list could continue. I realize this book was written in 1980, but still, it is stale.

Now, that is my first issue with this piece. There is more.

I am the first to salute the many excellent writers who have made great writing out of what are essentially lame rehashed storylines. Heck, science fiction is my first love….how many times do YOU think I’ve read “men meet the aliens who seem nice, but are bad, and are later defeated squarely by man, once he sees their evil ways”?

…..quite a few, I can tell you. So I’m not immediately averse to hearing the same tale told over. I began this book determined to give it a fair hearing. With the burden of foreknowledge thrust upon me by the back cover, I waded in. And in. And in some more. You will recall from my brief synopsis of the plot that the death of the child is the first odd thing that happens. This is fully half way through the book. And the very next incident, with the woman who looks like Krang? Fully two thirds of the way through. And what, you may ask, am I reading about in the first two thirds of the book other than this?

….not much. Thomas and Saxony hook up. Thomas and Saxony do some research. Thomas and Saxony move into Galen, the nice little town with all the nice people. Yawn.

Now, I know this is meant to be a book about frightening and weird things, from the back cover, so I’m expecting them to materialize. I am fully halfway through the book, and the most spooky and otherworldly thing which has happened is that I mysteriously lost my bookmark whilst making some coffee. Is this a fantasy mystery, or a stale dry dissection of a biography project? You tell me, Jonathon Carroll.

At last the pace starts to quicken in the last third of the book. It is not, however, rich in surprises. I was kind of hoping that after all that banality there was going to be some magnificent twist at the end of the book and I was going to have to change my opinion, and revise my whole view of the story in the light of some last minute revelation. I wish.

The problem, I find, with writing reviews of books which you haven’t really enjoyed is that the endless ranting can get a bit boring after a while. However, I suppose my mission here is to present you with enough information to be convinced that you don’t want to waste your precious life energy reading this book when there are so many fantastic books out there that you will never have time to read them all.

In that light, I will add to my list of dislikes of this work, that it has a lot of plot revolving around the infidelity of Thomas Abbey with Anna France. The author portrays Saxony in this, and indeed throughout much of the book , in a very two-dimensional manner - Saxony is written without a great deal of emotive expression. The author writes her as continuing to sleep with Thomas Abbey, even though she knows he sleeps with another woman , and yet fails to write any words where Saxony’s feeling are explained, expressed, or really even considered. To bring such an ugly subject into the book, and then to have the female victim be portrayed as little more than an object put a bad taste in my mouth.

So all in all, I give this book a fairly resounding thumbs down.

Sorry to have to bring you another review of a bummer book, but that’s the way my cookie has been crumbling lately!!!

Some of my other science fiction book reviews:

Rama Revealed
Prelude to Space
Stand on Zanzibar
The Demolished Man
The Stars my Destination
Cat's Cradle
The Gods Themselves
Watchmen
A Canticle for Leibowitz
The Hammer of God
The Left Hand of Darkness
Flowers for Algernon
Lord of Light
Rendevous with Rama
The Tombs of Atuan
The Dispossessed
I am Legend
The Einstein Intersection
Earth Abides
Peace on Earth
The Farthest Shore
Methuselah's Children
A Call to Arms
To your Scattered Bodies Go
The Lion of Comarre / Against the Fall of Night
To Say Nothing of the Dog
The Doomsday Book
Frankenstein Unbound
Batman - The Dark Knight Returns
Imperial Earth
A Case of Conscience
Solaris
The Sands of Mars
The Land of Laughs
Eden
His Masters Voice
Citizen of the Galaxy
King David's Spaceship
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Double Star
The Fabulous Riverboat
Songs of Distant Earth
Way Station
The Fountains of Paradise
The Long Tomorrow
Lincolns Dreams
Alas Babylon
More Than Human
1984
The Forever War
All the Myriad Ways
I Sing the Body Electric
Gateway
Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said
This Immortal
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress


Recommended: No