Chris Wilson, Mischief, Andre Deutsch, 1992.
christopher-wilson.net/9701.html
Human life is cosmic to observe and tragic to experience," declares Charles Xique Xique Duckworth, the narrator of Wilson's ( Bluegrass ) satirical fourth novel. A foundling discovered in a Brazilian river by a professor doing field research, he is the last of his tribe, the Xique Xique having been wiped out to make way for a rubber plantation. Charlie is raised by Professor and Mrs. Duckworth in England, and is quickly made aware that he is different than other people. Yet he perseveres and eventually earns a degree in psychology from the University of Kniggle, an ironic accomplishment because Charlie is convinced that the Xique Xique were not human but instead the homo sapien's evolutionary cousins who simply lost the game of natural selection. When he recounts his moment of recognition he admits, "I didn't know what I should do in life. But I believed it must involve impersonation; that to defend myself I'd have to gain a human facade." The facade is not one of appearance but of personality and motivation: Charlie adopts aggressiveness as his protective coloration. The author, who holds a doctorate on humor from the London School of Economics, accommodates the suspension of disbelief through a discreet use of puns that reinforces Charlie's beliefs and observations. The ending is inevitable but not contrived, and Wilson's commentary on the nature of humanity is solidly driven home. - Publishers Weekly
Chris Wilson's brilliant satire is a great read from beginning to end. The narrator is Charlie Duckworth, the adopted son of a proper English couple. Charlie, however, is not your average English son. He is the last surviving member of a Brazilian tribe, the Xique Xique (or Zika Zika), found on an expedition by the zoologist Duckworth.
Charlie is brought back to England and raised as the Duckworth's own. He is not entirely human in appearance, though because he matures at a rate about one-third slower than humans this is not immediately too obvious. He winds up six feet nine inches tall (when he slouches), his skin has a "translucent pearly sheen, betraying a map of veins beneath," his fingers and toes are long and thin, like pencils, his penis curled like a corkscrew. That and his character traits (guilelessness foremost among them) make it hard for him to fit in.
Charlie's parents are oblivious to his strangeness. He has a tougher time with others, especially of his age. Sent off to boarding school (to a fine institution appropriately called Lovesgrave) Charlie finds himself at odds with human norms. Guileless, harmless, without a malicious bone in his body he is particularly ill-suited for a boarding school environment. He recognizes the difficulty:
I am misshapen, mystified and misplaced. Naturally, then, I incite and entice. And my sympathy bears a portion of the blame. I am prone to smile at those in trouble, which they tend to take amiss.
There is little he can do to help himself, given his character, and he suffers for it. Finally finding out who (or rather what) he is he attempts to return to Brazil, but no one is interested in his tribe, extinct except for him. He goes to university (allowing Wilson room for an excellent send up of academic life, and student life in the 1960s) and slowly finds himself -- or rather the lessons needed to adapt to human ways.
Ultimately Charlie gets a job at a mental hospital. He finds love in another imperfect creature, and loses it as she loses her imperfection. Finally, he becomes like all those around him, finally fitting in, a dark transformation Wilson just manages to keep this side of the bleak.
Mischief is a remarkable book, exceptionally well written. The humour is sharp and poignant throughout, each sentence a thoughtful prick. Wilson is no moralizer here, though in fact it is one large moral tale. He has chosen the perfect narrator, given him just the right voice, and he holds the story on keel throughout.
Highly recommended, to one and all. - The Complete Review
Chris Wilson, The Ballad of Lee Cotton, Little Brown/Harcourt, 2005.
From his Icelandic father Lee Cotton gets his marble skin and blue eyes. From his mixed-race mother he gains his black identity. From his Mambo grandmother he inherits forebodings about his future. It's a combination that sets Lee apart from the other black kids growing up in Eureka, Mississippi. It marks Lee out as slightly odd. And very white. If childhood was confusing, adolescence proves life changing when Lee falls in love with the sublime Angelina. It's also life threatening: Angel's father is a freelance shooter for the Klan, who doesn't take kindly to his daughter's boyfriend. An act of appalling violence leaves Lee far from home with a new identity, a draft card, a memory that operates in flashback and a mental illness that makes him a sort of genius. He also has a reputation, back home, for being dead. Nobody (except possibly his grandmother) could envisage that Lee's rebirth is a headstart and not a handicap. His role in a quite remarkable journey through life will be to transform others as he has transformed himself...
"(T)he story's invention is too hectic, its relocations and shuckings of identity too abrupt, to locate Lee more than glancingly in a complex milieu. It belongs to the picaresque, and its moral preoccupations come second to its whimsy. (...) Let it be what it is: a well-paced, engagingly idiomatic, frequently silly novel that is much better at being funny than it is at being profound." - Sam Leith
"(W)hat began as an earthy adventure with a sweet protagonist devolves into an arbitrarily wacky picaresque narrated by a freak." - Jennifer Reese
"The result is a literary Forrest Gump: Lee Cotton is the Everyman who wanders through decades of American identity politics. It is a cleverly sustained act of invention, but the novel runs against the limits of invention, too. This sort of imagination isn't fed by experience. It's fed by other acts of imagination: books and movies in particular. And while Wilson has a flair for pastiche, his novel leaves you wondering what you're supposed to learn from imagination in its pure form. Wilson's writing delights in itself -- in alliteration, assonance, onomatopoetisms -- but he can't conjure experience out of wordplay." - Benjamin Markovits
"The Ballad of Lee Cotton is destined for prizes. It has a zany, freewheeling brilliance.(...) The underlying message may be trite ("We're all the same under the skin," Lee solemnly states); the energised style is anything but." - Alastair Sooke
"The problem with Everyman, even one as singular as Lee Cotton, is that the temptation to have him do everything can be too great. Christopher Wilson's hilarious, thoughtful novel suffers in parts from this syndrome. (...) If all of this tricksy flitting sounds too much, it is Cotton himself who makes this novel a treat. With his easy charm that is enthralling and endearing, he is an Everyman whose ballad is worth hearing." - Carl Wilkinson
"If this were a serious study of racist issues, it would be a disgrace. Thankfully, it is not. It took me a while to realise, but The Ballad of Lee Cotton is really just a bit of fun. (...) The eponymous character is flighty, simple and funny, just like the book.(...) That this novel never irritates, or lectures, or gets too serious, is due entirely to the charm of Lee Cotton, whose easy Southern manners and affability make the book worthwhile." - William Brett
"What is most delightful about this book, however, isn't its excellent satire of social surfaces, or the way it X-rays through the skin to reveal the person beneath, but the sheer exuberance of its electric, refreshingly inventive prose." - Anita Sethi
"Cotton is strong enough to make up for its tacked-on, O. Henry-ish ending. And that strength derives from one source: the wise, winning voice of its main character. If that voice comes across at times as synthesized -- Huck Finn meets Myra Breckinridge ? Candide meets Yossarian ? -- then at least credit Christopher Wilson with having great taste in muses, and especially for knowing how to fuse them into a character who is, paradoxically, a complete original." - Jeff Turrentine, The Washington Post
Christopher Wilson's Lee Cotton (actually: Leifur Nils Kristjansson Saint Marie du Cotton), who narrates the novel (fortunately not, as the British title suggests, in ballad-form) is one colourful character. Born to a black mother in Mississippi in 1950, Lee comes out all white, taking, in that regard, completely after his father, an Icelandic sailor who didn't stick around.
Lee has one serious identity problem, and others' mistaking his identity will plague him most of his life. Wilson takes this black-and-white premise and runs with it, but it only gets him so far. Once the Civil Rights era is done with it's the feminist struggle that is addressed: yes, Lee isn't just a black man in a white man's body, he becomes a man in a woman's body. (And since he still favours women, gay rights get covered too.) And that white surface appearance turns out not to be so permanent either .....
Lee's troubles begin when he's a kid and falls for the wrong local (white) girl, Angelina ("Angel for short" ...), who is unfortunately the daughter of one of the most violent racists in town. Once pop learns his daughter is seeing a black boy (even if he is a white black boy) he organises a violent assault on the kid, leaving him severely battered and far from home -- which at least allows Lee to start over with a new identity. All-white this time, too, though he is damaged goods in other respects. (He also become even more of a split-personality, as Wilson insists on duality at every turn -- more than once of the surgically enhanced sort.)
Lee is drafted, but gets to avoid Viet Nam because the beating he took has left him with some special abilities that the Army is willing to explore. So he gets stationed in the middle of nowhere, with a bunch of other freaks. He doesn't mean to escape from the army, but accidents do happen, and soon enough he's adopted another guise (or rather had it thrust upon him (or, rather: had the gist of the previous one lopped off)).
He fares fairly well as a woman too, though it takes a while for him to adjust to all that entails. Appearances can get him in trouble, but he makes it work for him, settling down in San Francisco, finding a partner.
Lee is never free of the past (or future), including Angelina. But he's surprisingly comfortable in his skins -- though, understandably, others have their problems with it. S/he's a good guy (or gal), too, a calming sort of influence on those s/he touches, only antagonistic to a very few.
Cotton is an unnatural life story, occasionally too forced-quirky, but for the most part Lee and his situations are appealing enough. The identity switches also can seem a bit forced -- it's hard to do them convincingly natural -- and the reader likely shares his partners' frustration after a while:
"You're inchoate, Lee. you're plastic; you're protean. What happens next ? Are you going to grow wings or transmute into a fawn ?"
And by that point Wilson has carried it so far that one regrets he hasn't carried it further, and let his character sprout wings or turn into Bambi. Still, while he doesn't get it quite right -- the timing is a bit off -- ultimately Wilson doesn't disappoint, even if it doesn't come quite as expected.
Some of the book is a bit hokey, and bits a bit simplistic, but overall it's a pretty impressive American canvas, circa 1950 through the early 1980s. More than that, it is a great reading-pleasure. What makes the book is the writing. One hesitates to call it spectacular, because it's not loud or grandiose, but page after page it is a remarkable achievement. It's a fast book, but not rushed, with short sentences and paragraphs (and episodes), but it flies by effortlessly. And every other sentence seems to offer a just-right turn of phrase -- not a writer showing off what he can do, but just showing it. It's obviously meticulously crafted, yet almost never feels crafted: the absurd figure that Lee's is -- and his voice -- come across as completely natural. Its generosity (and many comic turns) also add to the appeal.
Good fun, good story, great writing -- well worthwhile. - The Complete Review
Chris Wilson,
Wurd, Flamingo,1995.Set in prehistoric times, this is a novel about the advent of language - of how human beings first came to speak. The tale is told through the interaction between Blind, young and strong, and Gob, old and feeble.
IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WURD, AND THE WURD WAS 'WHAA?AA!'
One spring evening in a stone age encampment, the first word was uttered, followed shortly by the first lie. Before long someone had told the first story, cracked the first joke, sparked off the first row…
Gob's life is nearly over, His teeth are gone, his legs won't work, but one thing's for sure, there's nothing wrong with his mouth. Gob has seen it all – survived exile, earthquake, fire and ice to tell his tale, and nothing's going to stop him. After all, he is the world's first narrator, and his story is the extraordinary account of Man's first faltering steps on the confusing path to enlightenment.
"This is a strange, bollixed, brilliant poem of a book." - John Clute, New Statesman & Society
"The muddy language stifles much of what would otherwise be some fine writing with a number of highly comic moments The Wurd is let down by its special effects." - Gerard Woodward
The Wurd is set some thirty-five thousand years ago. The novel is largely centered around the discovery of language. The clever writer and accomplished stylist Chris Wilson would seem just right for such an undertaking. In large part he is. However, he has chosen to write the novel in a sort of phonetic English that, while generally conforming to modern grammar and usage, does not conform to our spelling. See, e.g. the title. Perhaps it makes the reader read more attentively, paying greater heed to the sound of the language. We just found it annoying. Incredibly annoying. Really, really annoying.
The tale is narrated by Gob. He's been called many things in his time on earth, but his is now the "oldest gob on Urf,", so Gob is good enough. He is old and lame by now, and the book is of his relating history ("Hystery") to Blind.
He tells of a world before the word. Language is the key, he and all the others recognize:
(W)e cum dumb for Talk an ignorant for Trewf. An no sooner we spoke our mouffull, an heard an earfull, then evrything gets going crazy, restless an moody, shifty an wind, flowy as waters, fickle an fierce as fire.
Wisdum lay at the roots of it. Langwij wur its trunk.
Wilson covers a lot of prehistory and the making of man here. Always clever, he weaves a fair story, mixing wit and wisdom. He also has a fine ear and, except for the atrocious spelling, this is a very well written book. The language is, in large part, even poetic. But the presentation is off-putting.
Worthwhile, but annoying. - The Complete Review
Chris Wilson,
Gallimauf's Gospel, Paladin, 1986.
On the island of the eccentric Lord Iffe in the outlandish West, a monkey is washed ashore, sole survivor of a shipwreck.
The islanders make her welcome in their fashion.
Identified as a Frenchman by Gallimauf, the philosophical doctor, Maria the monkey finds a central role in society, and a whole range of expectations imposed upon her. But the locals soon become wary of the unusual habits of the French, and curiosity turns to outrage. The foreigner must be taught a lesson...
Gallimauf's Gospel is a small, elegant novel, set largely on the Isle of Iffe in a past century. The island is cut off from much of the world, governed over by the eccentric Lord Iffe. Few visitors ever come here. One who does, setting off this tale, is Maria, the pet monkey of a cook on a ship that is shipwrecked. Only Maria survives, floating in a barrel until she reaches land.
A playful monkey, her first contact with the Iffe-locals leads to some misunderstanding on their part: they don't know what to make of this stranger that dangles in the trees. Doctor Gallimauf has the answer: he (for they believe the monkey to be male) is obviously a Frenchman, explaining his unusual deportment, manners, and silence.
The monkey acts like a monkey, but the islanders won't see her for what she is. One man, the merchant Hogg, even sees a great opportunity here and decides to wed his daughter Cordelia to the stranger.
All goes well for a while, but the misunderstandings must come to a cross, as they finally do -- helped also by two more visitors from afar, banished to the hell of Iffe.
The rich characters Wilson nimbly draws, including Lord Iffe and Mad Vera, and the smart progression of the book make for an entertaining read. The book is convincing in its unlikely scenario, the endearing (and clueless) monkey a marvelous focal point. Chris Wilson is always sly and rarely too heavy-handed in his satire. A clever, thoughtful, enjoyable little read. - The Complete Review
Chris Wilson, Baa, The Harvester Press, 1987.In 1891 Count Friedryk Baa MindeBerg hobbles through middle age. No other Scandinavian biologist has a firmer grasp of toads, marsupials or Africa as he. But his past is sneaking up with an irrational force that smothers him with guilt that refuses to disperse. By the author of "Blueglass".
"On the creamy skin of these pristine pages, I lay my flat black slug of a secret to trail its mucused path.
Passing through nature, I once ate a man..."
It is 1891 and modern times require modern remedies. Count Friedryk Baa Mindeberg hobbles through middle age on the crutch of reason. No other Scandinavian biologist has as firm a grasp on toads or Africa as he. No other biologist has taken such extreme excursions with flesh.
Baa is the most scrupulous of scientists. He selected his wife after long and fastidious ethnographic research into the tribe of women. His home is an inventor's paradise, replete with a mechanical marital bed, hydraulic pillows and electric water-closet. Yet beneath the crust of domestic logic, reason begins to crumble.
It doesn't help that Baa is working his way alphabetically through the Pharmacopeia, dosing himself with every drug en route.
Chris Wilson, Fou, Flamingo, 1993.
Lise Berg, a sprightly 97-year-old, haunts the streets, pubs and delicatessen of Islington telling tall tales. She is, however, an unreliable narrator, suffering from drastic memory lapses and a split personality. Somewhere hidden in her dark past is the key to her character and forgetfulness.
With a sharp-tongued, bitter-sweet nostalgia, from her attic in Islington, sustained by cognac and crisps, Liselotte Berg recounts her golden youth. Actress, sublime beauty, analysand of Freud and model for Kokoshka, Klikmt and Sciele, confidante of writers, kleptomaniac, drunk and multiple personality, her story is full of sharp wit and verve.
What secret shame surrounds her cousins Felix's nose? Whatever happened to her innocence? Why did she spill mayonnaise on Franz Kafka's manuscripts? Did she really help start two world wars?
Fou is an erotic tragi-comedy and psychological mystery, set against the decadence, extravagance and perversity of fin de siecle Vienna.
Chris Wilson,
Blueglass, Andre Deutsch, 1990.Tells the larger-than-life story of Joey Blueglass, music-hall artist and con-man, and his fatal passion for Florrie. Joey is a freak who can remember everything and play games with numbers. Set in 19th-century London, this book tells his story from when he was sold at ten years old.
There's no doubt about it. Joey Blueglass is a talented man. How many people can sing any song after hearing it once, read a newspaper then repeat its contents word for word backwards, or recall their life in the womb? Joey can and makes it pay by performing as a Memory Man in the smoky music halls of Victorian London, until it turns out there are some key events that Joey has forgotten...
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